In 2024, FastAPI became more popular than Django and Flask.
Source Jetbrains Python Developers Survey 2024.
Async-First Design
My previous article, Django vs FastAPI: A Practical Comparison, highlighted the challenges of using Django in an async application.
Asynchronous apps are increasingly needed when a person wants to assign a task to an agent and then do some other work instead of waiting for the agent to complete.
Common examples:
- request is sent to an LLM and it takes several minutes to get a response
- complex search on database
- upload and download large files
- web crawling
The following table from the same JetBrains Python survey illustrates the rise of async apps with FastAPI.
The following Python packages are used in async apps:
- Asyncio
- aiohttp
- httpx
Asyncio is used by 42% of people using FastAPI compared to 26% for Django.
As aiohttp and httpx are similar, I’ll add them together in a async http group.
async http is used by 50% of the people using FastAPI. Only 31% of the people are using these technologies with Django.
Summary
Although Django can be used to build asynchronous applications, the simplicity of using async-first FastAPI makes it more popular than Django
Next Steps
Join us in exploration asynchronous Python AI application development with FastOpp.