Jinja2 is indeed much faster and offers a more flexible expression syntan than Django's template engine. However, Django's native template engine has one huge advantage right now - when there is a syntax error in the templates, it almost always gives informative errors the correct location. Jinja2, as it is right now, often gives no errors and completely wrong locations for the problem. This has been a serious disadvantage for me when dealing with more complex templates. This is surely temporary, but is the state of affairs right now.