When comparing Gin-gonic vs Buffalo, the Slant community recommends Gin-gonic for most people. In the question“What are the best web frameworks for Go?” Gin-gonic is ranked 1st while Buffalo is ranked 6th. The most important reason people chose Gin-gonic is:
The documentation for Gin is broad and comprehensive. Most tasks that you will need to do relating to the router can be found easily in the docs.
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Pros
Pro Extensive documentation
The documentation for Gin is broad and comprehensive. Most tasks that you will need to do relating to the router can be found easily in the docs.
Pro Good for building REST APIs
Gin is a pretty minimalistic framework. Only the most essential features and libraries are included, making Gin a great framework for developing high-performance REST APIs.
Pro Well-tested and numerous middlewares
The Gin community has created numerous well-tested middlewares that make developing for Gin a charm. Features include gzip, an authorization middleware, and sentry.
Pro High performance
Gin runs 40x faster than Martini, and runs comparatively well compared to other Golang frameworks.
Pro Hot reloading
The dev command will watch your .go and .html files and the asset folder by default. It will rebuild and restart your binary for you automatically so you don't have to worry about such things.
Just run the buffalo dev command and go to localhost:3000/ to see all changes live!
Pro CLI project scaffolding
Buffalo aims to make building new web applications in Go as quick and simple as possible. buffalo new coke
That will generate a whole new Buffalo application that is ready to go. It'll even run go get for you to make sure you have all of the necessary dependencies needed to run your application.
Pro Database migration
Easily migrate database.
Pro Full web and api only generator for those not looking for full web templating
Pro Multi step Dockerfile included with scratch base for minimal size
Pro Embeded resources in binary for easy reference
Pro Great community channel when help is needed
Cons
Con Might not be suitable for large backend applications
Gin-gonic is great for building a REST API for the backend if you want to develop an SPA using a frontend framework. But for anything that requires more features on the server side, it would be better to use a more "batteries included" framework.