[eszed]

Nothing against Django, just suggesting another option: Laravel offers the same "out of the box" tools that Django does. Django is built with Python, Laravel with PHP. Someone will be along in a moment to start the flame wars about why one or the other or both totally suck, but for your purposes it's most important to choose the language and approach that will be most comfortable to you.

[TheCapeGreek]

Yeah, these days I'd put Laravel and Rails pretty toe-to-toe on features and productivity. Django is good but it's not in the same tier, imo.

[avtar]

> Django is good but it's not in the same tier, imo.

In what ways does Django lag behind Rails or Laravel?

[TheCapeGreek]

The ecosystems.

Laravel's first-party ecosystem, both paid and free, on top of the framework is quite widespread. This also brings a lot of people to the party on the third party side with excellent tools like Filament and Ploi. I don't see this nearly as much for Django. Have a look under the Ecosystem tab on the Laravel homepage. Within a few `composer install`s, you can get:

- Local dev environment (i.e. actually running the app): Herd, Sail

- Stripe/Paddle support: Cashier, Spark

- Starter kit scaffolds including all the usual auth goodies (e.g. 2FA): Breeze, Jetstream

- View layer alternatives to plain old HTML views: Livewire, Inertia

- API and Social logins: Passport, Sanctum (for SPAs), Socialite

- Fulltext search: Scout

- Robust APM: Pulse, and Telescope on dev

- Admin panels: Nova, and 3rd party Filament

- Websockets: Echo, Reverb (coming soon)

- Infrastructure, both traditional and serverless: Forge, Envoyer, Vapor, Ploi

- Completely alternative PHP runners to replace php-fpm: Octane with Roadrunner, Swoole, or FrankenPHP

- Automated browser testing: Dusk

You can find Django packages for these things too, but I struggle to see many of them coming from the actual Django team. I also think the Django Admin solution is very neat for getting off the ground, but doesn't seem as robust as Nova or Filament.

Lastly, call it my bias, but Python's overall lacklustre developer experience with package and environment management (compared to Composer and Ruby gems) also affects Django as a result.

[avtar]

Thanks so much for the thorough reply! Especially including ecosystem details.

[justech]

Also PHP has Laravel Spark[0]. They basically bootstrapped a SaaS but for a price. Not sure if it's worth it, but it's from the guys who made Laravel, and everyone only has good things to say about that so...

[0] https://spark.laravel.com