Flask vs Spring-Boot

Overview

Flask

Stacks19.3K

Followers16.2K

Votes60

Spring Boot

Stacks26.7K

Followers24.3K

Votes1.0K

GitHub Stars78.9K

Forks41.6K

Flask vs Spring Boot: What are the differences?

Flask and Spring Boot are two popular frameworks used for building web applications. Let's explore the key differences between Flask and Spring Boot.

Language and Framework Compatibility: Flask is a microframework for Python, allowing developers to have more control over the application structure. On the other hand, Spring Boot is built on top of the Java Spring framework, providing a full-stack solution for Java web development.
Scope and Features: Flask is known for its simplicity and lightweight nature, making it a popular choice for small to medium-sized applications. It provides only the essential features for web development, allowing developers to choose and add additional libraries or components as per their requirements. Spring Boot, on the other hand, comes with a wide range of features and integrations out-of-the-box, making it suitable for large-scale enterprise applications.
Deployment and Containerization: Flask applications can be deployed using any web server that supports the WSGI protocol, such as Apache or Nginx. Flask also provides a built-in development server for quick testing. Spring Boot, on the other hand, includes an embedded Tomcat or Undertow server, allowing application deployment as a standalone executable JAR file. This makes it easier to package and deploy Spring Boot applications as Docker containers.
Community Ecosystem: Flask has a smaller but active community, with a wide range of third-party libraries and extensions available through the Flask extension registry. However, compared to Spring Boot, the ecosystem for Flask is relatively smaller. Spring Boot has a large and mature community, with extensive documentation, tutorials, and a vast number of libraries available through Spring's official repository.
Testing and Integration: Flask provides a testing framework that makes it easy to write unit tests for applications. It also integrates well with third-party testing libraries like pytest and nose. Spring Boot, on the other hand, offers a comprehensive testing framework with support for unit testing, integration testing, and end-to-end testing. Spring Boot also has strong support for integration with popular testing frameworks like JUnit and Mockito.
Database and ORM: Flask provides support for various ORM (Object-Relational Mapping) libraries like SQLAlchemy and peewee, allowing developers to work with different databases. Spring Boot, on the other hand, has built-in support for the Spring Data JPA library, which offers seamless integration with different database technologies through the Hibernate ORM. Spring Boot also provides support for NoSQL databases like MongoDB through Spring Data MongoDB.

In summary, Flask is a lightweight and flexible framework for Python web development, while Spring Boot provides a full-stack solution for Java web development, with a wide range of features and integrations. Flask is often preferred for smaller projects or when the developers require more control and flexibility, while Spring Boot is suitable for large-scale enterprise applications with more extensive out-of-the-box functionality.

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Advice on Flask, Spring Boot

Eva

Fullstack developer

Jul 28, 2020

Needs adviceon

Java

Spring Boot

JavaScript

Hello, I am a fullstack web developer. I have been working for a company with Java/ Spring Boot and client-side JavaScript(mainly jQuery, some AngularJS) for the past 4 years. As I wish to now work as a freelancer, I am faced with a dilemma: which stack to choose given my current knowledge and the state of the market?

I've heard PHP is very popular in the freelance world. I don't know PHP. However, I'm sure it wouldn't be difficult to learn since it has many similarities with Java (OOP). It seems to me that Laravel has similarities with Spring Boot (it's MVC and OOP). Also, people say Laravel works well with Vue.js, which is my favorite JS framework.

On the other hand, I already know the Javascript language, and I like Vue.js, so I figure I could go the fullstack Javascript route with ExpressJS. However, I am not sure if these techs are ripe for freelancing (with regards to RAD, stability, reliability, security, costs, etc.) Is it true that Express is almost always used with MongoDB? Because my experience is mostly with SQL databases.

The projects I would like to work on are custom web applications/websites for small businesses. I have developed custom ERPs before and found that Java was a good fit, except for it taking a long time to develop. I cannot make a choice, and I am constantly switching between trying PHP and Node.js/Express. Any real-world advice would be welcome! I would love to find a stack that I enjoy while doing meaningful freelance coding.

826k views826k

Comments

Kristan Eres

Senior Solutions Analyst

Jul 30, 2020

Needs adviceon

Django

Python

Flask

My journey to developing REST APIs started with Flask Restful, and I've found it to be enough for the needs of my project back then. Now that I've started investing more time on personal projects, I've yet to decide if I should move to use Django for writing REST APIs. I often see job posts looking for Python+Django developers, but it's usually for full-stack developers. I'm primarily interested in Data Engineering, so most of my web projects are back end.

Should I continue with what I know (Flask) or move on to Django?

392k views392k

Comments

Slimane

Jul 9, 2020

Needs adviceon

Spring Boot

NestJS

Node.js

I am currently planning to build a project from scratch. I will be using Angular as front-end framework, but for the back-end I am not sure which framework to use between Spring Boot and NestJS. I have worked with Spring Boot before, but my new project contains a lot of I/O operations, in fact it will show a daily report. I thought about the new Spring Web Reactive Framework but given the idea that Node.js is the most popular on handling non blocking I/O I am planning to start learning NestJS since it is based on Angular philosophy and TypeScript which I am familiar with. Looking forward to hear from you dear Community.

917k views917k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Flask	Spring Boot
Flask is intended for getting started very quickly and was developed with best intentions in mind.	Spring Boot makes it easy to create stand-alone, production-grade Spring based Applications that you can "just run". We take an opinionated view of the Spring platform and third-party libraries so you can get started with minimum fuss. Most Spring Boot applications need very little Spring configuration.
Statistics
GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars 78.9K
GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 41.6K
Stacks 19.3K	Stacks 26.7K
Followers 16.2K	Followers 24.3K
Votes 60	Votes 1.0K
Pros & Cons
Pros 10 For it flexibility 9 Flexibilty and easy to use 7 User friendly 6 Secured 5 Unopinionated Cons 10 Not JS 7 Context 5 Not fast 1 Don't has many module as in spring	Pros 149 Powerful and handy 134 Easy setup 128 Java 90 Spring 85 Fast Cons 23 Heavy weight 18 Annotation ceremony 13 Java 11 Many config files needed 5 Reactive
Integrations
No integrations available	Spring Java

What are some alternatives to Flask, Spring Boot?

Node.js

Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices.

Rails

Rails is a web-application framework that includes everything needed to create database-backed web applications according to the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern.

Django

Django is a high-level Python Web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design.

Laravel

It is a web application framework with expressive, elegant syntax. It attempts to take the pain out of development by easing common tasks used in the majority of web projects, such as authentication, routing, sessions, and caching.

.NET

.NET is a general purpose development platform. With .NET, you can use multiple languages, editors, and libraries to build native applications for web, mobile, desktop, gaming, and IoT for Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and more.

ASP.NET Core

A free and open-source web framework, and higher performance than ASP.NET, developed by Microsoft and the community. It is a modular framework that runs on both the full .NET Framework, on Windows, and the cross-platform .NET Core.

ExpressJS

Express is a minimal and flexible node.js web application framework, providing a robust set of features for building single and multi-page, and hybrid web applications.

Symfony

It is written with speed and flexibility in mind. It allows developers to build better and easy to maintain websites with PHP..

Spring

A key element of Spring is infrastructural support at the application level: Spring focuses on the "plumbing" of enterprise applications so that teams can focus on application-level business logic, without unnecessary ties to specific deployment environments.

Android SDK

Android provides a rich application framework that allows you to build innovative apps and games for mobile devices in a Java language environment.

Related Comparisons

Flask vs Spring Boot: What are the differences?

Flask and Spring Boot are two popular frameworks used for building web applications. Let's explore the key differences between Flask and Spring Boot.

Language and Framework Compatibility: Flask is a microframework for Python, allowing developers to have more control over the application structure. On the other hand, Spring Boot is built on top of the Java Spring framework, providing a full-stack solution for Java web development.
Scope and Features: Flask is known for its simplicity and lightweight nature, making it a popular choice for small to medium-sized applications. It provides only the essential features for web development, allowing developers to choose and add additional libraries or components as per their requirements. Spring Boot, on the other hand, comes with a wide range of features and integrations out-of-the-box, making it suitable for large-scale enterprise applications.
Deployment and Containerization: Flask applications can be deployed using any web server that supports the WSGI protocol, such as Apache or Nginx. Flask also provides a built-in development server for quick testing. Spring Boot, on the other hand, includes an embedded Tomcat or Undertow server, allowing application deployment as a standalone executable JAR file. This makes it easier to package and deploy Spring Boot applications as Docker containers.
Community Ecosystem: Flask has a smaller but active community, with a wide range of third-party libraries and extensions available through the Flask extension registry. However, compared to Spring Boot, the ecosystem for Flask is relatively smaller. Spring Boot has a large and mature community, with extensive documentation, tutorials, and a vast number of libraries available through Spring's official repository.
Testing and Integration: Flask provides a testing framework that makes it easy to write unit tests for applications. It also integrates well with third-party testing libraries like pytest and nose. Spring Boot, on the other hand, offers a comprehensive testing framework with support for unit testing, integration testing, and end-to-end testing. Spring Boot also has strong support for integration with popular testing frameworks like JUnit and Mockito.
Database and ORM: Flask provides support for various ORM (Object-Relational Mapping) libraries like SQLAlchemy and peewee, allowing developers to work with different databases. Spring Boot, on the other hand, has built-in support for the Spring Data JPA library, which offers seamless integration with different database technologies through the Hibernate ORM. Spring Boot also provides support for NoSQL databases like MongoDB through Spring Data MongoDB.

Flask vs Spring-Boot

Overview