5 Reasons To Choose Django in 2024

Deciding on full-stack technology is daunting. There's a large number of frameworks to assess. 

I'll share my contrarian viewpoint. Choose Django. The Django Python framework is old, but it gets the job done quickly and cheaply. Django has an "everything included and opinionated" philosophy. This approach makes it very fast to get started with Django. As your project scales, separate Django into individual components that can be used as a SQL database manager, an object-relational mapper, or an API server.

In 2024, we stopped using Firebase and MongoDB on the backend and moved to Django. While many projects can benefit from more modern frameworks, choosing newer technology can also lead to more costs as teams struggle to find developers with the required skills and later find the development budget expanding as unforeseen problems arise. With Django, the development path has been smoothly paved by tens of thousands of developers before you.  

For the types of small projects we build for business workflows, Django is not only faster to bring ideas into prototype, it is also cheaper to build and maintain. Here are the top 5 reasons why Django should be considered in 2024.

1. SQL as a Service

Django uses an SQL database. Like Django, SQL is considered old and not as glamorous as newer NoSQL databases like MongoDB. One way to view Django is as an SQL database with pre-built code to make the database easier to use. If Django fails to meet your future requirements for a specific function, you can still use the SQL database alone or use portions of Django to make the database easier to access.  

 In our case, part of our Django deployments consists of a hosted PostgreSQL database as a service. To start, we simply add the connection information to the Django app. This architecture also allows us to use Django as a temporary prototype tool to set up a working interface and logic to data. As the project evolves, we can bypass Django and connect directly to the database with another application such as Flutter or React, or set up a stripped-down intermediary server to bridge the database and front end. 

The maturity of  SQL is also an advantage when hiring talent. Many universities and technical schools include SQL as part of the mainstream curriculum. Hiring talent from schools is easier as the students have recent academic experience and are eager to gain more real-world experience. Most business software projects can be completed without advanced SQL database administration skills. 

2. API Service

The ability to use SQL or the Django REST framework to expose API endpoints allows us to quickly build multiple interfaces to the database using different technologies. Although Django templates are easy to learn and powerful, the templates aren't as interactive as more reactive frameworks.  

Fortunately, Django can serve both the Django page templates and a REST API for the same data.  This means that you can test out different front-end architectures while reusing most of the core logic of the backend.

The benefit of starting with Django instead of an API server is that it is easier to get started with Django and prototype a concept. Django is super easy to install and comes with everything needed for a web application. pip install django will get you going. It's very fast to build a functional prototype and deploy it. Django comes with authentication, a database, a development web server, and template syntax.  This allows complex sites to be built quickly with different security groups and a built-in admin panel for staff. 

3. Serverless Architecture

Django makes it easy to deploy to a serverless architecture and eliminates virtual server setup and maintenance. Starting in 2023, we moved our Django projects to a serverless architecture. Previously, we used Ubuntu Linux in virtual servers. We used to run PostgreSQL, NGINX, and Django in the same scalable virtual server. Moving to a set of cloud services for database, storage, CPU, and network took less than a day to start a new project. 

During software development, our code is pushed to GitHub on a branch that we can preview as a web application in a browser. After a peer or manager reviews the pull request, it's merged into the main branch which triggers automatic deployment of the code to the production service to run the application. The GitHub deployment script for Django as well as the settings was provided by the application service. We just copied it and deployed. 

As our application service can't be used to storage media and data, we use a different service to store media such as images. Since Django has been used for a long time, there is going to be a solution for almost any connectivity problem you encounter. For example, AWS SDK for Python, Boto3, provides easy access to S3, which is how we handle storage.

4. Python

Python remains one of the most popular languages. It is widely taught at all levels of education in the US, including elementary, middle, high, and college. This vast pool of people makes recruitment easier and the integration of Python into a structured academic curriculum leads to better programming practices. Even with no experience with Python, people familiar with another language can get productive quickly.

With no compilation, Python promotes a very fast development workflow. The lack of compilation does come with a performance penalty. For most projects, hardware is cheaper than labor. With a scalable cloud-based architecture, the performance of Django is never an issue for projects with low simultaneous connections.

Although Python is dynamically typed, you can use typing to take advantage of type hints. 

Perhaps more important than the language features is the toolchain. As Python does not require compilation, the toolchain is easier to set up and maintain. Lightweight tools such as pyenv and venv can keep the version of Python and packages consistent across the development team. As long as the PATH is set up correctly on the developer workstations, development and deployment are usually free of drama.  Our team uses a mix of Windows 10, Windows 11, macOS, and Ubuntu 22.04 for development.  Although not required, everyone uses VS Code with a range of Python extensions.

5. Community

After more than 20 years, almost all Django problems have been solved by other people.  

The huge size and long history of the community also help with staff changes. Most of the information on Django can be found with a search, either using a QA site or an AI site.

For comparison, when I use other, newer frameworks, I find that I need to get my information by asking questions to people, often on systems such as Discord or Slack.

For Django, I usually don't need to wait for a person to answer my question as the question has usually been asked and answered by the tens of thousands of Django developers before me. Although there are a number of free and inexpensive courses on both Django and Python, most people simply start coding and search for answers.

While the Python language and Django are both under active development, most problems in small projects do not occur with the edge case of the language or framework.  

Django Growth in the Future

I'm not going to predict the future. Young people are going to create it. In my company, we have an active undergraduate intern program. Of course, they use and like Django. However, that's part of their job. What surprises me is that they use Python and Django in their own projects outside of work. I usually expect people under 24 to use JavaScript and possibly TypeScript for both the back end and the front end of a full-stack project. The young programmers are the future and they often use Python as the backend and a combination of Django admin panel, Django template syntax, and something like React on the front end.

Ultimately, a more modern framework may work better for your project. If you like Python, then Flask or FastAPI may be better than Django. GraphQL with Django may be better than the tried and true REST protocol. However, before you dismiss Django as old and monolithic, take another look at it from a componentized perspective. It may be the fastest and cheapest way to bring your creative ideas to life.

After 20 years, Django still works great.