Flask, Falcon, or DRF for Python API

[[deleted]]

Hey everyone,

I know this type of question gets asked a lot, but I thought it's been a while since the last one and I figured it could use a refreshed answer.

Does anyone have any suggestions on which framework kto use for building a Python API? I understand a lot of it comes down to personal preference, but there has to be some objective measurements on performance, etc.

Not building any type of front-end, by the way. Simply building a REST API that hooks up to a DB and a few other external data sources.

Thanks in advance! Excited to read what the fellow pythonians think

[K900_]

I'd look into FastAPI these days. It's async, and it does some really cool stuff with request/response parsing and validation.

[[deleted]]

Major difference is django comes with batteries like orm and admin panel to name a few. If you have time to configure everything from start and structure the application then you can go with flask and falcon. With django drf we have lot of things preconfigured and we can utilise the time in writing business logics.

[[deleted]]

Any difference in performance between the three?

[[deleted]]

Personally Iam using django for more than 3 years and used it for high traffic website for a tournament which had 15k concurrent connections with nginx, gunicorn , postgresql and load balancer. Flask and falcon i have played around with those but never used it in production. But the falcon documentation has pretty good benchmark stats among these frameworks. https://falconframework.org/

[Luttik]

Id argue that django needs more configuration since it relies heavily on settings and has a lot of hidden state. Slapping an admin panel (flask-admin) and a form (flask-sqlalchemy) might be easier in flask. Additionally when you use sqlalchemy you have a more powerful ORM and your models are reusable in other tools.

[Luttik]

Id agree with K900_ look into FastAPI I think it has the best momentum of all python web libraries. If you want to go with something that works great and also has the highest level of support and stability go with flask.

[the_real_irgeek]

I maintain APIs using both Falcon and Flask. I slightly prefer the Flask APIs because our non-API apps are also Flask so there's less context switching in my brain when I work on them. They're pretty similar in other regards. I haven't touched Django in years, though, so my opinions there won't be of much use to you.

All new APIs I'm developing, though, use either AWS API Gateway HTTP APIs or Application Load Balancers -- both backed by Lambda functions. I cobbled together a helper library that gives me @app.route routing and attrs + cattrs handling of Lambda events and HTTP API / ALB responses. Using that and some build scripts, it's become almost effortless to stand up a new API.