Top 20 Python web and API frameworks
Django, Flask, FastAPI and the rest, from full-stack sites to REST and GraphQL APIs
Updated · GitHub stars (stars)
Why these 20
Ranked by GitHub stars: how many developers bookmarked the project. Stars measure attention, not quality, so each row also shows forks, licence, the last push and the section of the community list it sits in. Full-stack frameworks (Django, Flask) and API toolkits that sit on top of them (Django REST framework, flask-restx) are in one list, so the 'listed under' column says which kind each one is. Older frameworks collected stars for longer than new ones like Litestar or FastHTML.
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1
fastapi
A modern, fast, web framework for building APIs with standard Python type hints.
103,301 stars 10,068 forkslast push 2026-10-21PythonMIT
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2
django
A high-level web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design.
91,473 stars 37,166 forkslast push 2026-10-21PythonBSD-3-Clause
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3
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4
django-rest-framework
A powerful and flexible toolkit to build web APIs.
30,209 stars 7,091 forkslast push 2026-10-20PythonNOASSERTION
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5
reflex
A framework for building reactive, full-stack web applications entirely with Python.
28,969 stars 1,811 forkslast push 2026-10-21PythonApache-2.0
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6
tornado
A web framework and asynchronous networking library.
22,168 stars 5,583 forkslast push 2026-10-20PythonApache-2.0
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7
starlette
A lightweight ASGI framework and toolkit for building high-performance async services.
12,678 stars 1,393 forkslast push 2026-10-18PythonBSD-3-Clause
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8
django-ninja
Fast, Django REST framework based on type hints and Pydantic.
9,215 stars 620 forkslast push 2026-10-20PythonMIT
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9
bottle
A fast and simple micro-framework distributed as a single file with no dependencies.
8,798 stars 1,517 forkslast push 2026-10-10PythonMIT
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10
litestar
Production-ready, capable and extensible ASGI Web framework.
8,523 stars 675 forkslast push 2026-10-20PythonMIT
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11
fasthtml
The fastest way to create an HTML app.
7,061 stars 324 forkslast push 2026-10-20Jupyter NotebookApache-2.0
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12
strawberry
A GraphQL library that leverages Python type annotations for schema definition.
4,726 stars 669 forkslast push 2026-10-20PythonMIT
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13
connexion
A spec-first framework that handles requests based on your OpenAPI specification.
4,614 stars 787 forkslast push 2026-10-20PythonApache-2.0
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14
pyramid
A small, fast, down-to-earth, open source Python web framework.
4,102 stars 895 forkslast push 2026-08-04PythonNOASSERTION
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15
flask-restx
Fully featured framework for fast, easy and documented API development with Flask.
2,231 stars 348 forkslast push 2026-04-14PythonNOASSERTION
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16
django-modern-rest
Modern REST with speed, types, async, `msgspec`, `pydantic` and other goodies.
1,511 stars 225 forkslast push 2026-10-21PythonMIT
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17
apiflask
A lightweight Python web API framework based on Flask, supporting marshmallow schemas and Pydantic models.
1,139 stars 146 forkslast push 2026-10-18PythonMIT
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18
flask-smorest
A Flask/Marshmallow-based REST API framework with automatic OpenAPI documentation.
717 stars 78 forkslast push 2026-10-13PythonMIT
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19
strawberry-django
Strawberry GraphQL integration with Django.
504 stars 157 forkslast push 2026-10-19PythonMIT
How it is measured
Every project in the Web Frameworks and Web APIs sections of the community list vinta/awesome-python on GitHub that has a public repository, ranked by GitHub stars from the GitHub API; archived repositories are left out. Refreshed every 6 hours. gRPC is left out: its repository is the whole multi-language gRPC project, so its stars aren't the Python package's.
References
- vinta/awesome-python: Web Frameworks and Web APIs, GitHub community list (list text CC BY 4.0; star counts from the GitHub API). Checked 2026-10-21 08:59 UTC.
- vinta/awesome-python (Web Frameworks, Web APIs), GitHub community list, 19 tools with a public repository.
