DRF or FastAPI?

A framework is always a precious help to accelerate the development of heavy and complex web applications. Django Rest Framework and FastApi are both extremely popular with Python API developers. Django Rest Framework aka DRF is a full-stack web framework, while FastApi aims to be a Web framework for developing RESTful APIs in Python. FastApi VS Django: what to choose according to your priorities? Here are some understanding keys to better understand the differences between these two Python frameworks.

Django Rest Framework

Django Rest Framework is a powerful and flexible toolkit for building Web APIs.

• Django Rest lets you scale the API quickly according to your needs.
• Django Rest provide some fluent authentication and account management features
• Django Rest is versatile
• Django Rest has a fairly large community, allowing users to ask questions and quickly find solutions to problems.
• Django has an excellent security feature built-in to avoid common attacks like CSRF, SQL injection, etc.
• No out-of-the-box REST support and lacks interactive documentation
• Django Rest comes with a built-in ORM (Object-relational mapping) framework that developers can start using right out of the box. Serialization supports both ORM and non-ORM data sources.

Django Rest Framework is used by internationally recognised companies including Mozilla, Red Hat, Heroku, and Eventbrite.

FastAPI

FastAPI is a modern, fast, web micro framework for building APIs with Python 3.7+ based on standard Python type hints

• FastAPI is much faster than Django and is one of the fastest web frameworks for Python but no built-in security system
• FastAPI type hints to validate, serialize, and deserialize data and automatically auto-generate OpenAPI documents.
• FastAPI enables out-of-the-box concurrency thus avoiding creating event loops or async/waiting handling but impacting the efficiency of your application.
• Built-in dependency injection solution
• Good documentation support
• Good exception handling
• Good data validation system

Large companies like Uber and Netflix use it to develop some of their applications

CONCLUSION

Django Rest Framework remains the most popular and offers better security guarantees while FastAPI is faster. Django Rest seems more suitable for large, sensitive projects. FastAPI is therefore more suitable if you need performance and better rendering.