Akka vs Play: What are the differences?

Developers describe Akka as "Build powerful concurrent & distributed applications more easily". Akka is a toolkit and runtime for building highly concurrent, distributed, and resilient message-driven applications on the JVM. On the other hand, Play is detailed as "The High Velocity Web Framework For Java and Scala". Play Framework makes it easy to build web applications with Java & Scala. Play is based on a lightweight, stateless, web-friendly architecture. Built on Akka, Play provides predictable and minimal resource consumption (CPU, memory, threads) for highly-scalable applications.

Akka belongs to "Concurrency Frameworks" category of the tech stack, while Play can be primarily classified under "Frameworks (Full Stack)".

"Great concurrency model" is the primary reason why developers consider Akka over the competitors, whereas "Scala" was stated as the key factor in picking Play.

Akka and Play are both open source tools. Play with 11.2K GitHub stars and 3.77K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Akka with 10.1K GitHub stars and 3.04K GitHub forks.

Coursera, Zalando, and Keen are some of the popular companies that use Play, whereas Akka is used by Asana, Rainist, and ContentSquare. Play has a broader approval, being mentioned in 112 company stacks & 47 developers stacks; compared to Akka, which is listed in 76 company stacks and 57 developer stacks.