Gunicorn vs PythonAnywhere vs Unicorn

Overview

Unicorn

Stacks479

Followers401

Votes295

GitHub Stars1.5K

Forks269

Gunicorn

Stacks1.3K

Followers908

Votes78

GitHub Stars10.3K

Forks1.8K

PythonAnywhere

Stacks90

Followers293

Votes64

Gunicorn vs PythonAnywhere vs Unicorn: What are the differences?

1. **Key Difference between Gunicorn and PythonAnywhere**: Gunicorn is a Python WSGI HTTP server while PythonAnywhere is a platform that provides hosting and server management services for Python web applications. Gunicorn focuses on serving the application, managing worker processes, and providing scalability, while PythonAnywhere offers a complete infrastructure for deploying and managing Python web applications. 2. **Key Difference between Gunicorn and Unicorn**: Gunicorn is a Python-specific HTTP server, while Unicorn is a Ruby-specific HTTP server. While both servers follow the Worker model to handle concurrent requests, Gunicorn is built to serve Python applications and utilizes Python worker processes, whereas Unicorn is designed for Ruby applications and utilizes Ruby worker processes. 3. **Scalability Differences**: Gunicorn uses a pre-fork worker model, where the master process forks worker processes to handle simultaneous requests. This allows Gunicorn to scale horizontally by adding more worker processes. On the other hand, PythonAnywhere provides built-in vertical scalability as users can opt for higher-tier plans to allocate more CPU power, memory, and network bandwidth. 4. **Environment Management**: PythonAnywhere offers a complete development and deployment environment, including a web-based console, file editor, database access, and scheduled tasks. Gunicorn, on the other hand, mainly focuses on server deployment and management without providing a comprehensive development environment like PythonAnywhere. 5. **Deployment Options**: Gunicorn can be used with various deployment options, including standalone server deployment, integration with other web servers like Nginx or Apache, or orchestration with containerization tools like Docker. PythonAnywhere, on the other hand, only supports deployment on their platform and does not provide integration with other servers or containerization tools. 6. **Community and Ecosystem**: Gunicorn has a larger and more active community as it is widely used in the Python development ecosystem. It has extensive documentation, a large number of contributors, and a thriving ecosystem of plugins and extensions. PythonAnywhere, while also having a supportive community, is more focused on providing a managed hosting platform rather than building an extensive ecosystem for Python developers.

In Summary, Gunicorn is a Python WSGI HTTP server focused on scalability and worker process management, while PythonAnywhere is a Python hosting platform with a complete deployment and management environment. Unicorn, on the other hand, is a Ruby-specific HTTP server with similar worker process handling but lacks the Python-oriented features of Gunicorn.

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Detailed Comparison

Unicorn	Gunicorn	PythonAnywhere
Unicorn is an HTTP server for Rack applications designed to only serve fast clients on low-latency, high-bandwidth connections and take advantage of features in Unix/Unix-like kernels. Slow clients should only be served by placing a reverse proxy capable of fully buffering both the the request and response in between Unicorn and slow clients.	Gunicorn is a pre-fork worker model ported from Ruby's Unicorn project. The Gunicorn server is broadly compatible with various web frameworks, simply implemented, light on server resources, and fairly speedy.	It's somewhat unique. A small PaaS that supports web apps (Python only) as well as scheduled jobs with shell access. It is an expensive way to tinker and run several small apps.
Statistics
GitHub Stars 1.5K	GitHub Stars 10.3K	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 269	GitHub Forks 1.8K	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 479	Stacks 1.3K	Stacks 90
Followers 401	Followers 908	Followers 293
Votes 295	Votes 78	Votes 64
Pros & Cons
Pros 81 Fast 59 Performance 36 Web server 30 Very light 30 Open Source Cons 4 Not multithreaded	Pros 34 Python 30 Easy setup 8 Reliable 3 Fast 3 Light	Pros 15 Web apps 11 Easy Setup 8 Free plan 8 Great support 8 Shell access Cons 1 Really small community 1 No root access
Integrations
No integrations available	No integrations available	Python

What are some alternatives to Unicorn, Gunicorn, PythonAnywhere?

NGINX

nginx [engine x] is an HTTP and reverse proxy server, as well as a mail proxy server, written by Igor Sysoev. According to Netcraft nginx served or proxied 30.46% of the top million busiest sites in Jan 2018.

Heroku

Heroku is a cloud application platform – a new way of building and deploying web apps. Heroku lets app developers spend 100% of their time on their application code, not managing servers, deployment, ongoing operations, or scaling.

Apache HTTP Server

The Apache HTTP Server is a powerful and flexible HTTP/1.1 compliant web server. Originally designed as a replacement for the NCSA HTTP Server, it has grown to be the most popular web server on the Internet.

Clever Cloud

Clever Cloud is a polyglot cloud application platform. The service helps developers to build applications with many languages and services, with auto-scaling features and a true pay-as-you-go pricing model.

Google App Engine

Google has a reputation for highly reliable, high performance infrastructure. With App Engine you can take advantage of the 10 years of knowledge Google has in running massively scalable, performance driven systems. App Engine applications are easy to build, easy to maintain, and easy to scale as your traffic and data storage needs grow.

Red Hat OpenShift

OpenShift is Red Hat's Cloud Computing Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering. OpenShift is an application platform in the cloud where application developers and teams can build, test, deploy, and run their applications.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk

Once you upload your application, Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment details of capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and application health monitoring.

Microsoft IIS

Internet Information Services (IIS) for Windows Server is a flexible, secure and manageable Web server for hosting anything on the Web. From media streaming to web applications, IIS's scalable and open architecture is ready to handle the most demanding tasks.

Apache Tomcat

Apache Tomcat powers numerous large-scale, mission-critical web applications across a diverse range of industries and organizations.

Passenger

Phusion Passenger is a web server and application server, designed to be fast, robust and lightweight. It takes a lot of complexity out of deploying web apps, adds powerful enterprise-grade features that are useful in production, and makes administration much easier and less complex.