The programming language and the main framework are often crucial for startups. The speed and quality of resolving tasks depend on them. At the same time, tools have to be modern to save time and be flexible for the quick rebuilding of the solution.
Python with Django is a perfect example of a typical solution to such a problem. They provide an ideal opportunity for the development team to create a product with any level of stability. From quick-and-dirty prototypes to stable, scalable applications. The wide range of benefits makes Django a powerful solution as the main technology for startups. And we at Daiquiri Team are versed in this.
Popularity
According to the TIOBE index, Python is the most popular language in April 2022. At the same time, Django has the largest number of stars on Github of all Python frameworks — 63.6K. The closest competitors are Flask with 58.7K and the rising star FastAPI with 44.3K.
Why is this important? The more popular the technology is, the more developers have created their projects using it. The more such projects were created, the more problems the developers faced and successfully solved. Developers' loyalty to the technology shows they are confident that there are no significant problems in solving business problems using this technology.
Recruiting the developer
It is vital for startups to be capable of hiring developers quickly. Django's popularity plays into the hands of product owners. The developer on Django is really relatively easy to find. Most Python developers with commercial experience have at least encountered Django.
Okay, among experienced developers Django is popular, what about newbies? The situation is definitely not worse. Django has a lot of educational materials (for example, here courses on Udemy), which reduces the entry threshold.
Django is also a cost-effective framework to work with. According to StackOverflow, Django developer's annual salary is $45.3K, while FastAPI developer's salary is $54K, for Flask — $54.8K.
What makes Django so appealing to developers? The answer lies in the following reason.
Simplicity and speed of development
Django positions itself as a Battery-included framework. So, it’s a framework where the biggest part of technical problems has ready-to-go and customizable solutions. It’s especially important for startups to have the ability to spend the developer’s time just on considerable things.
The developers can focus on resolving business tasks, not on developing things that were already built. In distinction to the above-mentioned Flask and FastAPI web frameworks, Django has built-in:
- ORM and mechanisms of migration for a lot of DBMS,
- System of users and access rights,
- Administrative panel,
- Cache framework, internationalization and localization modules, etc.
A critical indicator for early-stage startups is time-to-market. That’s why the speed of hypothesis testing has to be high. Django has a ready-made project structure that fits well for a quick start.
Also, Django has a lot of integration with 3rd-party, many of which are official ones. That's why Django developers spend less time working on solutions due to ready-made ones. These solutions are tested well, and their readiness to use in commercial projects is proven in practice.
You can also check out our case of developing an IoT system using Django. In that story, we had built a prototype in 3 weeks from scratch.
Quality of documentation
Django’s documentation is cool; everyone knows this. You can check it on Reddit, Quora, YCombinator.
Moreover, Django is open-source. The source code of Django has a large number of comments, which are elaborated extensively and in detail. That’s why every Django developer knows that if there are any doubts about the implementation of some functionality, you can just read the source code.
If it’s not enough for you, here’s one more argument — the size of the community knowledge base. There are 288.7K questions on StackOverflow tagged django. In comparison: Flask has 49K, and FastAPI — 2.8K issues. The vast knowledge base from the community simplifies the resolving of almost every development task. You can hardly worry that you will encounter a unique problem that the developers will have to resolve for a very long time.
Performance
For startups, the speed of hypothesis testing and time-to-market is more important than readiness for high load. Nevertheless, the ability to scale in the sense of performance is quite important for startups; otherwise, moving to a qualitatively different level can be very expensive.
Django authors didn't have a particular idea to make it very fast, but its performance is enough for most startups' products. According to one of the most trustworthy benchmark, Django is even quicker than Flask.
With the proper setup, Django can withstand enormous loads; this has been repeatedly proven by the experience of both startups and industry leaders.
Deployment
Due to the maturity of Django, there are a large number of ready-made solutions for PaaS services for Django hosting. For example, heroku, GCP, Bitnami, Clever Cloud.
Also, Django can be easily set up for work on any VPS, for example, on Digital Ocean.
Convenient and easy-to-set-up deployment is the key to a productive workflow for developers and solid security at the production stage. With Django, you will have a minimum of problems on this matter.
Positive experience of big companies
As we already said, Django is used by big companies, such as Instagram, Dropbox, YouTube, Spotify, The Washington Post, etc. Also, it is used by many middle and small startups to build their products. That’s why around Django, there are many solutions that especially startups need.
Django is a powerful framework both for the early and mature. It is perfect for experiments and for a stable product. Django has a huge number of ready-made solutions that are easy to customize for most real-life tasks.
We at Daiquiri Team have developed many products on Django. If you are interested in assessing whether this is a good choice for your product technologically — write to us, and we will be glad to discuss it.
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