How do people feel about Django vs flask in 2023? Just trying to farm for other's experiences because I find flask easier to start off with but I suspect I am biased.
I’m the sole maintainer of a Flask app that uses SqlAlchemy, and the experience is similar except that I really miss the admin and auth. However every single flask app ends up using slightly different libraries and architecture, which means that onboarding always takes longer than an equivalent Django app.
Also, I have over a decade of Python experience; I wouldn’t count on people with little Python experience to produce well architected apps in Flask, whereas Django does a lot of guiding the user towards established patterns.
Some parts of Django are antiquated and I do not recommend them (specifically the Forms API really has been superseded by pretty much any newer forms library), but that’s still way less baggage than having to pick up a new stack for every new Flask app.
Are you recommending people use something like WTForms directly?
I think the rendering aspect in the Forms API has always been a PITA and the validation aspects always left something to be desired. Rendering and validation/serialization should be decoupled IMO, and in that sense the Forms API fails.
Sometimes I wish for the Django admin to be reimplemented in FastAPI/SqlAlchemy as a more modern approach to the same problems.
Could Django do some things better? Sure, but it gets so much right, and has so much community support, it should be the default answer. If you ever get stuck with a problem, thousands of others have faced the same thing. With Flask, owing to your special snowflake configuration of extensions and wiring, you may not find any guidance anywhere.
https://adamj.eu/tech/2019/04/03/django-versus-flask-with-si...
Flask works for simple projects but as your needs grow, the built-in and extensive Django ecosystem will have you covered. And as seen above, Django in its simplest form is no more complex.
Some people really don't like the Django ORM, so in this case you might avoid Django altogether. It's possible to use Django without its data layer but it's a big part of its value.
Also if you are building a pure API project, FastAPI is worth checking out for a streamlined process. Django Rest Framework works too, but is an extension.