Django vs. Laravel - Ultimate Head to Head Comparison
What are the best technology choices for web development? Django and Laravel are two of the most popular back-end development frameworks in the world.
Despite mobile development's popularity and the demand for it rising, web development has been getting a great deal of attention, and the technologies are evolving at an accelerated pace. Especially with the rise of new development concepts such as Progressive Web Applications, Accelerated Mobile Pages, and Single Page Applications, Javascript's popularity skyrocketed. For young developers just starting, things have become more complicated.
Because of the sheer number of technologies available, their different features, and the fact that there's no holy grail in web development, nor a one solution fits all, it can be daunting to embark on a learning journey.
Therefore, in this article, we will attempt to demystify the process and explain these different technologies. There are two commonly used back-end development frameworks in the web development world: Laravel and Django.
Django
Developed by Django Software Foundation, Django made its debut in 2005. It is licensed under the 3-clause BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) license. Django is lightweight and has a standalone feature for development and testing. Developing complex web applications faster is a primary objective of the Django framework.
Django is a model view template framework built with Python. It is a free and open-source framework that enables rapid development and helps developers write more efficient code. The framework is quite robust, which is why some of the most prominent companies in the world rely on it for their back-end infrastructure. Pinterest, Udemy, NASA, and Instagram are among these companies.
Laravel
Taylor Otwell created and developed Laravel, first released in 2011. Laravel requires basic or advanced PHP knowledge. It is possible to build CMS (Content Management System) applications with Laravel. As far as user traffic is concerned, Laravel has upscale features. Furthermore, it is possible to speed up the development process by using the framework, which includes built-in features to help ease the life of a developer.
Laravel is a model-view-controller framework written in PHP, which is one of the most famous languages on the web. It offers good features for developing web applications from scratch in an easier way. Furthermore, 9GAG, UNION, and Toyota Hall of Fame use it as a framework.
Django vs. Laravel: Key Differences
The following points can help you determine the performance differences between Django and Laravel:
- Django is a high-level web framework based on Python that provides rapid development and clean design solutions. Meanwhile, Laravel is also a web application framework with elegant syntax, including routing, sessions, authentication, and caching.
- Django offers rapid development, a large community, great packages, easy-to-learn, and excellent libraries. Laravel, on the other hand, offers fast development, dependency injection, an application architecture, good community packages, the MVC model, plus a growing community, etc.
- Django has some cons in some features, like unsupported or less performance templating, URL dispatchers, poorly supported ORM, internal subcomponent coupling, and Laravel has some cons in huge static methods calling and slow performance.
- Laravel only supports HTTP middlewares, whereas Django supports a variety of middlewares. Using Python, Django is slightly faster, while Laravel uses PHP, which is a little bit slower.
- Django comes with many built-in tools, such as decorators, SEO tools, third-party libraries, etc., while Laravel comes with fewer features and method injection.
- Laravel uses a composer tool to load all dependencies and libraries using a file called composer.json placed in a source folder. Django components are lightweight, have serialization and validation systems, and allow you to translate between web pages and databases.
- While Django uses Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) to bridge the gap between the application and the database, Laravel has a query builder and offers Object Relational Mapping (ORM) with an active record implementation.
- Due to its built-in internationalization system, Django is compatible with multiple multilingual websites, while Laravel has different namespaces and interfaces meant to organize and manage the resources.
- Administration Graphical User Interface, which is ready to use for administrative tasks or activities, is supported by Django. At the same time, Laravel authentication and template engine mechanisms allow developers to design the hierarchy schemas layouts, including some dynamic content.
- Django supports multiple frameworks, including Ajax, Caching, RSS (Rich Site Summary) feeds, and more. Meanwhile, Laravel has configuration management, routing, and testability where configurations of management activities are consistent across different machines using the Laravel framework.
- With Django, you can develop and test your applications in a lightweight environment with an easier and faster deployment process, ensuring end-to-end development and testing. The Laravel framework, on the other hand, contains queues, events, and command buses, which run cron jobs. By using the Event Command Bus, you can execute different commands and dispatch events effortlessly.
Conclusion
Laravel supports PHP, while Django supports Python. Among Django and Laravel frameworks, the only differences are their respective languages and the several features and libraries they offer to serve different purposes.
You cannot go wrong with any of these frameworks since they support large websites. It all depends on what you want to achieve and what you have designed. In addition, back-end frameworks are generally similar at their core, so switching from one framework to another isn't that difficult.
Thanks for reading this article. I hope you found it useful. Feel free to leave a comment if you did.
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