Django and FastAPI are both excellent — they optimize for different things. This guide gives you a practical way to choose, plus the common architecture that uses both.
When Django wins
- You need a strong admin out of the box
- The product is an admin-heavy web app or content platform
- You want an ORM, auth, and migrations without assembly
- Your team values convention over configuration
When FastAPI wins
- You're building an API-first product or microservice
- Async throughput matters (many concurrent IO-bound requests)
- You're serving ML models and want typed contracts
- You want automatic OpenAPI docs from Pydantic models
The best of both
A common and pragmatic architecture: Django for the web app and admin, FastAPI for high-throughput or ML-serving endpoints. Don't force one tool to do everything — use each where it's strongest.
What about Flask?
Flask is a fine micro-framework, but for new async APIs we usually prefer FastAPI (typing, docs, performance), and for full apps Django. Flask fits small, highly custom services.