Engineering
What Are Litestar, Django and Flask?
Three Python web frameworks that sit at different points on the same trade off between batteries included and bring your own.
Definition
Litestar, Django and Flask are Python frameworks for building web applications and APIs. They differ mainly in how much they decide for you. Django ships a full stack including an ORM and admin interface, Flask provides a minimal core that you extend, and Litestar is an async first framework built around type hints and dependency injection.
Django
Django is opinionated and complete. It includes an object relational mapper, migrations, an authentication system, an admin interface and a template engine. That makes it efficient for content heavy applications where those pieces are needed, and heavier than necessary for a small API.
Flask
Flask provides routing, request handling and templating, and leaves the rest to extensions. It is a good fit for small services and for cases where the team wants to choose its own database and validation layers. The cost is that architectural decisions that Django makes for you become yours to make and maintain.
Litestar
Litestar is an ASGI framework designed around asynchronous handlers, Python type hints and dependency injection. Types on a handler drive both validation and the generated OpenAPI schema, which removes a class of drift between code and documentation. It suits API first services and applications that mix rendered pages with JSON endpoints.
Choosing between them
The practical question is how much of the application is standard. If the answer is most of it, Django saves time. If the application is mainly an API surface over your own logic, an async framework such as Litestar keeps the code closer to the problem. Flask remains a reasonable default for something small.
Litestar is a powerful, flexible, highly performant and opinionated ASGI framework.