StackShareStackShare
Follow on
StackShare

Discover and share technology stacks from companies around the world.

Follow on

© 2025 StackShare. All rights reserved.

Product

  • Stacks
  • Tools
  • Feed

Company

  • About
  • Contact

Legal

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Frameworks
  4. Frameworks
  5. Play vs Yesod

Play vs Yesod

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Play
Play
Stacks752
Followers609
Votes496
GitHub Stars12.6K
Forks4.1K
Yesod
Yesod
Stacks37
Followers41
Votes15
GitHub Stars2.7K
Forks376

Play vs Yesod: What are the differences?

What is Play? 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.

What is Yesod? A RESTful Haskell web framework built on WAI. Yesod believes in the philosophy of making the compiler your ally, not your enemy. We use the type system to enforce as much as possible, from generating proper links, to avoiding XSS attacks, to dealing with character encoding issues. In general, if your code compiles, it works. And instead of declaring types everywhere you let the compiler figure them out for you with type inference.

Play and Yesod can be categorized as "Frameworks (Full Stack)" tools.

"Scala" is the primary reason why developers consider Play over the competitors, whereas "Haskell" was stated as the key factor in picking Yesod.

Play and Yesod are both open source tools. Play with 11.2K GitHub stars and 3.77K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Yesod with 2.11K GitHub stars and 329 GitHub forks.

Coursera, Zalando, and Keen are some of the popular companies that use Play, whereas Yesod is used by FP Complete, DoxIQ, and SimplyRETS. Play has a broader approval, being mentioned in 112 company stacks & 47 developers stacks; compared to Yesod, which is listed in 5 company stacks and 5 developer stacks.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs
CLI (Node.js)
or
Manual

Advice on Play, Yesod

Leonardo
Leonardo

Project manager and web developer at Revo Digital

Mar 22, 2021

Needs adviceonTypeScriptTypeScriptRailsRailsScalaScala

In the past few months, a project we're working on grew up quite fast. Since we're adding more and more features, I'm considering migrating my Express/TS REST API towards a more solid and more "enterprise-like" framework. Since I am experienced with TypeScript but not so much with Rails nor Play (Scala), I'd like to have some advice on which one could provide the best development experience, and most importantly, the smoothest paradigm transition from the JS/TS world. I've worked on some personal project with Rails, but I've found the Ruby language really distant from what the TypeScript ecosystem and syntax are, whereas on the opposite - during the brief tours I've taken in the past weeks - it's been a pleasure coding in Scala. Obviously, there are some key differences between the two languages - and the two frameworks consequently - but despite all the ROR automation and ease of use I don't despise at all Scala's pragmatic and great features such as static typing, pattern matching, and type inference. So... Please help me out with the choice! Regards

2.74M views2.74M
Comments
Hosam
Hosam

Senior Software Engineer

Apr 18, 2021

Review

If software performance is your top priority, then Scala/Play is probably best. If developer productivity is your top priority, then Ruby on Rails is the best choice in my opinion.

The Rails framework is batteries-included. The framework takes care of many things by default so that you don't have to. Logging, security, etc. It's also well-integrated; for example, controllers understand models out of the box. I had a better experience with RoR than with Play.

On the other hand, Scala and the JVM are more performant in general, so they can scale to serve more requests per second on the same hardware.

If you're considering serverless functions, then Scala is probably a better choice because it would be faster to load, giving you better economics.

53.4k views53.4k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Play
Play
Yesod
Yesod

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.

Yesod believes in the philosophy of making the compiler your ally, not your enemy. We use the type system to enforce as much as possible, from generating proper links, to avoiding XSS attacks, to dealing with character encoding issues. In general, if your code compiles, it works. And instead of declaring types everywhere you let the compiler figure them out for you with type inference.

-
Safety & security guaranteed at compile time; Developer productivity; Raw performance; Fast, compiled code; Techniques for constant-space memory consumption; Asynchronous IO
Statistics
GitHub Stars
12.6K
GitHub Stars
2.7K
GitHub Forks
4.1K
GitHub Forks
376
Stacks
752
Stacks
37
Followers
609
Followers
41
Votes
496
Votes
15
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 81
    Scala
  • 55
    Web-friendly architecture
  • 55
    Built on akka
  • 50
    Stateless
  • 47
    High-scalable
Cons
  • 3
    Evolves fast, keep up with releases
  • 1
    Unnecessarily complicated
Pros
  • 6
    Haskell
  • 4
    Super High Performance
  • 3
    Open source
  • 2
    Type safe URLs
Integrations
No integrations available
Haskell
Haskell

What are some alternatives to Play, Yesod?

Node.js

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

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

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

Laravel

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

.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

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.

Symfony

Symfony

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

Spring

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.

Spring Boot

Spring Boot

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.

Android SDK

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

Bootstrap
Materialize

Bootstrap vs Materialize

Laravel
Django

Django vs Laravel vs Node.js

Bootstrap
Foundation

Bootstrap vs Foundation vs Material UI

Node.js
Spring Boot

Node.js vs Spring-Boot

Liquibase
Flyway

Flyway vs Liquibase