Had to pick between Python's Flask and Django for my first real project

I went with Flask cause it seemed simpler for a small app I wanted to build, and now 3 weeks in I'm wishing I had just learned Django since I'm adding all these extras manually. Has anyone else started with one framework and regretted not picking the other from the start?

3 comments

3 Comments

joseph_black22d agoMost Upvoted

Went with Flask and spent three weeks reinventing wheels I didn't know existed.

harper_smith22d ago

3 weeks is NOTHING in the grand scheme. I spent 6 months on a Flask project before I finally gave up and switched to Django. All those "reinvented wheels" you built? They're ACTUALLY valuable because now you understand WHY Django does things the way it does. Flask taught me SQLAlchemy from scratch, which makes Django's ORM feel like cheating. You'll never blindly trust a framework again after that.

kelly.parker22d ago

Flask's actually 8 years older than Django, not the other way around. Django came out in 2005, Flask in 2010. But yeah I feel you on the regret thing. I started with Django for my first project and honestly the admin panel alone saved me like a week of work. Flask is great for microservices or APIs where you really don't need the ORM and auth stuff built in, but for anything with users and a database Django just has everything ready to go. That said, three weeks isn't that deep, you can switch now and the patterns you learned in Flask will transfer over way faster than starting from zero.