Despite the popularity and the rising demand for mobile development, web development has been getting a tremendous amount of attention and the technologies are evolving quite rapidly. The sheer amount of available technologies to choose from, the different functionalities they provide. The differences in each one of them and the fact that there’s no holy grail in web development, nor a one solution fits all, all of this makes it quite scary to embark on a learning journey.
Django
Django is a popular web framework written in Python. This free, open-source framework was first introduced by two web programmers. Adrian Holovaty and Simon Willison, working at Lawrence Journal-World newspaper to develop applications. Named after the famous guitarist Django Reinhardt. Its development began in 2003 while the first milestone release came out in September 2008.
Django facilitates faster and secure builds and frees the developer from mundane web development tasks, negating the need to create solutions from scratch. With multiple out-of-the-box features, it lets you create complete applications. It goes well with all kinds of websites and supports multiple formats (HTML, RSS feeds, JSON, XML, etc.). Additionally, Django comes with various security features and is easy to scale.
Laravel
Laravel is an open-sourced web framework known for its server-side handling of routing, HTML authentication, templating, and more. Created by Taylor Otwell, Laravel is written in PHP and is based on Symfony that provides reusable PHP components/libraries. Since it is a server-side-based framework, with Laravel, you can build applications with pre-defined architectures, customized backend logic, web portal, templates, and full-stack apps as well as manage SaaS products.
There is also the presence of an upscale feature in terms of more user traffic. The development time can be reduce. In terms of framework feature which provides inbuilt features to ease the life of a developer. Laravel has good features to develop a web application from scratch in an easier way.
Comparison Between Django vs Laravel
Every framework has a unique attribute that endears it to its users. Both Django and Laravel are no different. But when it comes time to pick one that best serves your needs, then a deeper dive has to be taken to understand the scope of each.
Popularity
Needless to say, it is a very popular framework. Django is leading in website categories of computer and electronics, food and drinks, science, and reference. It is a leading web framework in the U.S., France, Spain, Russia, and 30 other countries.
Laravel, on the other hand, is use in more website categories that include arts and entertainment, business and industry, Internet and telecommunications, shopping, and travel. As a web framework, it has a leading usage in Brazil, China, the UK, and 157 other countries.
Community
Both Django and Laravel communities are very active and responsive. Both the communities have a large number of contributors on Github and commits are also very frequent. If you ever get stuck at some point in either of these frameworks, then somebody from the community would get you out for sure.
Learning Curve
Django: The learning curve for Python is virtually non-existent. So it is simple and quite easy to use Django. Offering better readability for code, the framework instantly puts the beginner developer at ease.
Laravel: It is very intuitive and will let you master modern PHP development with database migrations, Eloquent ORM Composer, packages, REST, templating, etc. Learning resources are abundant, but you have to master them, considering the steep learning curve.
Performance
Here Django leads by a landslide. Laravel and Django were tested head-to-head in 2018 for JSON serialization and since python’s quite a speedy language it won by a landslide difference. Django performed 69k JSON responses/second while Laravel was at a humble 8kresponses/second. In terms of speed, Laravel doesn’t compare with Django, unfortunately.
Security
Being online and staying online is not an easy task. The world of the web is quite a hostile environment, with attacks and vulnerabilities being exploited all the time. This is why frameworks need to take measures against different attacks, whether SQL injections or cross-site scripting. Django takes security quite seriously and helps developers avoid the common mistakes of web development and implement some security best measures. While Laravel does also cover the basics of security it doesn’t live up to Django’s security level.
Code
The win goes to Laravel here with more simplified coding. If you take a look at any basic routing code written in both languages, you would notice that Laravel’s code is quite intuitive. Django’s code, on the other hand, seems rather complex. That’s because it uses regular expressions in its routing process, which are not the easiest thing to use, especially with beginners.
API
This is the bread and butter of most apps developers. The easier it is to integrate or create an API, the more loved by developers it becomes. You might not be interested in all the functionalities that a back-end framework has to offer and would rather build a client-rich application with a RESTful API. The beautiful thing about Laravel is that it comes with built-in support for API building, as the queries return JSON by default. Django doesn’t come with this built-in feature and you’d have to use a library to work around it and implement the same feature.
Conclusion
While Django comes up ahead when dealing with security and performance it doesn’t mean it is the best solution to use in all cases. Sometimes simplicity and ease of use are far more important than speed. This is why there are still tons of developers using Laravel today. While building backbone solutions would require a solid and secure framework with good speeds. The requirements are not so stringent if you are building one thing more simple and that learns toward the more creative side of human nature. Here, the ease and intuitive nature of Laravel makes it a better fit.