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Streamlit VS FastAPI

Compare Streamlit VS FastAPI and see what are their differences

Streamlit logo Streamlit

Turn python scripts into beautiful ML tools

FastAPI logo FastAPI

FastAPI is an Open Source, modern, fast (high-performance), web framework for building APIs with Python 3.6+ based on standard Python type hints.
  • Streamlit Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-07
  • FastAPI Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-05-14

Streamlit features and specs

  • Ease of Use
    Streamlit's API is extremely intuitive and easy to learn, which makes it accessible for developers of varying experience levels. The simplicity allows for rapid development and less time spent on complex front-end coding.
  • Interactive Widgets
    It provides a set of interactive widgets that make it simple to add complex functionalities like sliders, buttons, and file uploaders to your application with minimal code.
  • Real-time Feedback
    Streamlit supports real-time data updates, allowing users to see changes instantly. This is particularly useful for data analysis and machine learning applications where live data visualization is crucial.
  • Integration with Machine Learning Libraries
    Streamlit integrates seamlessly with popular machine learning libraries like TensorFlow, PyTorch, and scikit-learn, making it a great tool for showcasing machine learning models and results.
  • Open Source
    Being an open-source project, Streamlit is free to use and comes with the support and contributions of an active community. This means continuous improvements and a wealth of shared resources.

Possible disadvantages of Streamlit

  • Limited Customization
    Streamlit offers limited customization options compared to traditional web frameworks. This can be a hindrance if you need a highly customized UI/UX for your application.
  • Performance Issues
    For more complex or resource-intensive applications, Streamlit may suffer from performance drawbacks. It is not designed for high-performance computing out of the box.
  • Scalability
    Streamlit is not well-suited for large-scale applications requiring major backend architecture or for scenarios demanding high scalability and concurrency.
  • Limited Widget Style Options
    The styling and customization options for widgets are somewhat limited, meaning your application's look and feel might be more constrained compared to using other front-end frameworks.
  • Deployment Complexity
    While Streamlit provides some deployment options, deploying Streamlit apps in a production environment can sometimes require additional effort and knowledge, especially for those unfamiliar with web deployment practices.

FastAPI features and specs

  • High Performance
    Built on Starlette and Pydantic, FastAPI is one of the fastest frameworks for Python, providing high performance due to its asynchronous request handling.
  • Automatic Interactive API Documentation
    FastAPI automatically generates interactive API documentation via Swagger UI and ReDoc, which are very helpful for development and testing.
  • Type Checking and Validation
    With Pydantic models and Python type hints, FastAPI provides automatic data validation and type checking, reducing the chance of runtime errors.
  • Ease of Use
    Its syntax and design make it easy to learn for Python developers, offering a smooth development experience while reducing boilerplate code.
  • Asynchronous Support
    FastAPI supports asynchronous programming, allowing for better performance for I/O-bound operations, making it optimal for handling many simultaneous connections.
  • Extensive Documentation
    It has comprehensive and well-structured documentation, which is very useful for both beginners and advanced users.
  • Community and Ecosystem
    FastAPI has a growing community and ecosystem, with many plugins and integrations available to extend its functionality.

Possible disadvantages of FastAPI

  • Learning Curve for Asynchronous Programming
    Although FastAPI itself is easy to learn, grasping the concepts of asynchronous programming in Python can be challenging for beginners.
  • Complex Dependencies
    Using Pydantic for advanced validation can make the request models complex, requiring a deeper understanding of Pydantic and its functionalities.
  • Early Stage Libraries
    Some third-party libraries and extensions specifically tailored for FastAPI might still be in early stages of development and lack long-term stability.
  • Limited Real-World Examples
    Although the documentation is extensive, there might be limited real-world examples and case studies readily available compared to more mature frameworks.
  • Deployment Complexity
    Deploying FastAPI applications might be more complex in comparison to traditional synchronous frameworks, mainly due to the need for asynchronous server setups.

Analysis of Streamlit

Overall verdict

  • Overall, Streamlit is well-regarded for its ease of use, speed of development, and ability to create clean and professional-looking applications without in-depth web development knowledge. It provides a seamless bridge between complex data analysis and user-friendly presentation, which can be highly beneficial for a wide range of use cases.

Why this product is good

  • Streamlit is a popular choice for quickly building and deploying data applications and interactive dashboards with minimal code. It is designed to be user-friendly, allowing data scientists and engineers to transform their scripts into shareable web apps. It supports real-time updates, is highly customizable, and integrates well with Python libraries like NumPy, Pandas, and Matplotlib, making it an attractive option for many developers working within the Python ecosystem.

Recommended for

    Streamlit is ideal for data scientists, analysts, and developers looking to rapidly prototype and deploy data-driven applications. It is recommended for those who prioritize simplicity, quick deployment, and seamless integration with Python code. Individuals or teams interested in building dashboards, ML model sharing platforms, or interactive reports will find Streamlit particularly useful.

Analysis of FastAPI

Overall verdict

  • FastAPI is widely regarded as a good choice, especially for applications that require high performance, scalability, and modern Python features. It is suitable for both simple and complex projects, making it a versatile tool in the web development ecosystem.

Why this product is good

  • FastAPI is a modern, fast (high-performance), web framework for building APIs with Python 3.7+ based on standard Python type hints. It is built on top of Starlette for web framework capabilities and Pydantic for data validation and settings management. FastAPI is known for its excellent performance, automatic generation of interactive API documentation (with Swagger and Redoc), and support for asynchronous programming. Developers appreciate its ease of use, detailed documentation, and helpful error messages.

Recommended for

  • Developers building RESTful APIs
  • Teams looking for a high-performance ASGI-based web framework
  • Projects that require asynchronous programming capabilities
  • Applications needing automatic generation of interactive API documentation
  • Python developers who prefer utilizing type hints for code clarity and validation

Streamlit videos

My thoughts on web frameworks in Python and R (PyWebIO vs Streamlit vs R Shiny)

More videos:

  • Review - 1/4: What is Streamlit
  • Tutorial - How to Build a Streamlit App (Beginner level Streamlit tutorial) - Part 1

FastAPI videos

FastAPI from the ground up

More videos:

  • Tutorial - 30 Days of Python - Day 14 - Web App with Flask, FastAPI, ngrok, and Invictify - Python TUTORIAL
  • Review - [PT] Python - API com FastAPI - Chat | twitch.tv/codeshow

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Streamlit and FastAPI)
Developer Tools
34 34%
66% 66
Productivity
100 100%
0% 0
API Tools
0 0%
100% 100
AI
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Streamlit and FastAPI

Streamlit Reviews

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FastAPI Reviews

  1. Kurslog team
    ยท Working at Kurslog ยท

    When our backend team needs to build services for data parsing, aggregators, or high-load APIs, FastAPI is our absolute go-to choice. It completely lives up to its name-development speed is outstanding.

    The combination of Pydantic for data validation and built-in async support keeps our shared codebase clean, strictly typed, and reliable. But the biggest highlight for our cross-functional team is the automatic generation of interactive OpenAPI (Swagger) documentation. Our frontend and mobile developers no longer have to wait for backend engineers to manually update API docs; everything stays perfectly in sync automatically. It has drastically improved our team's communication and delivery speed.

    ๐Ÿ Competitors: Django, Flask, ExpressJS, Nest.js, Spring Boot
    ๐Ÿ‘ Pros:    Blazing fast performance (on par with nodejs and go)|Native asynchronous support out of the box|Automatic, interactive documentation generation (swagger/redoc)|Strict typing and data validation with pydantic
    ๐Ÿ‘Ž Cons:    Smaller plug-and-play ecosystem compared to older frameworks like django|Requires our architects to design the project structure and directory layout from scratch

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FastAPI, as the name hints, is a swift mover. Built on Starlette, itโ€™s all about speed and performance with Python. Crafting API masterpieces at the speed of light, now thatโ€™s something.
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Since its release in 2018, it has rapidly gained popularity due to its great performance and simplicity. In fact, according to PyPi Stats, FastAPI has over 9 million monthly downloads, surpassing even full-stack frameworks like Django.
Source: kinsta.com
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myapp/ is the main directory of your FastAPI application. It includes all the other files and directories needed for the application.static/ is a directory used to store static assets such as CSS, JavaScript, and image files. These assets are served directly by the web server and are typically used to add visual styling and interactivity to the application.css/, img/, js/...
Best Alternatives to FastAPI App Free for Windows (2021)
FastAPI Alternative โ€“ So many alternatives app to FastAPI that you must to know out there. And, looking for an ideal software was not easy matter. Lucky you, at this page you can find the best replacement app for FastAPI. So what you are waiting for, get the latest FastAPI alternative app for Windows 10 from this page.
Top 5 Back-End Frameworks to Consider for Web Development in 2021
FastAPI is a modern, fast (high-performance), web framework for building APIs with Python 3.6+ based on standard Python type hints. It is fast when compared to other major Python frameworks like Flask and Django. FastAPI gives great flexibility to fulfill businessesโ€™ API needs in todayโ€™s evolving world.

Social recommendations and mentions

FastAPI might be a bit more popular than Streamlit. We know about 311 links to it since March 2021 and only 219 links to Streamlit. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Streamlit mentions (219)

  • Adding Authentication and SSO to a Streamlit App
    Streamlit makes it simple to turn Python scripts into shareable data apps. As these apps move from personal notebooks to team and company use, adding secure authentication and single sign-on (SSO) becomes essential. Authentication protects sensitive data and gates features by user identity. SSO lets people sign in once and move across apps without repeating logins. - Source: dev.to / 4 months ago
  • How I trained a computer vision model on the AWS Free Tier
    The app I built to explore that question is a Streamlit app with two modes. Standard mode sends your image to the DetectLabels API and checks if it returns "Egg" or "Easter Egg" in the labels. Custom Labels mode uses a custom model I trained on my own images. Both draw bounding boxes around any eggs they find. - Source: dev.to / 4 months ago
  • How to Analyze 47 Million Hacker News Posts: A Data Scientist's Dream Dataset Just Got Better
    Once you've completed your analysis, consider building a dashboard to visualize your findings. Tools like Streamlit make it easy to create interactive web apps:. - Source: dev.to / 4 months ago
  • [TIL][Python] Python Tool for Online PDF Viewing, Comparison, and Data Import
    Title: [TIL][Python] Online PDF Page-by-Page Viewing and Comparison Tool for Importing Data (Python online PDF Viewer and comparison) and Python Snippets Published: false Date: 2023-08-04 00:00:00 UTC Tags: Canonical_url: http://www.evanlin.com/til-python-tips/ --- ## Small Project: Online PDF Viewer and Parse Data compare: -... - Source: dev.to / almost 3 years ago
  • Experimenting with Javelit - The Streamlit for Java
    Javelit brings the power of rapid prototyping and interactive web app development to the Java ecosystem, much like Streamlit does for Python. With its simple, loop-based programming model, developers can quickly build data-driven applications without needing extensive frontend knowledge, leveraging familiar Java syntax and the rich JVM ecosystem. The live-reload feature enables instant experimentation and... - Source: dev.to / 7 months ago
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FastAPI mentions (311)

  • Shipping Sovereign SDK: Cryptographic Forensic Receipts and the End of the AI "Prose Tax"
    The Sovereign SDK is a Python-native framework designed to minimize prose overhead while generating ironclad, cryptographic execution receipts for AI agents, complete with drop-in FastAPI/Starlette ASGI middleware. - Source: dev.to / about 2 months ago
  • 5-Minute AI Jobs and Closed Tabs โ€” Why We Built Replay-Then-Tail SSE
    We had a feature in production where a single user request could run for five-plus minutes โ€” fetch documents, chunk them, hit an LLM per chunk, synthesize a final answer. We did the obvious thing first: a FastAPI handler that ran the pipeline and streamed progress back to the browser over Server-Sent Events. - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • FastAPI With LangChain and MongoDB
    FastAPI is a Python framework for building APIs quickly, efficiently, and with very little code. - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • I Built A " CrowdSense AI " : A Scalable, Context-Aware Platform for Smart Stadiums
    Backend: Python-based FastAPI for its asynchronous I/O capabilities and rapid JSON serialization. - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • Async PyMongo in FastAPI
    FastAPI is a high-performance web framework that is production-ready and designed for building APIs in python, with roots embedded in asynchronous programming. It embraces Pythonโ€™s asyncio model as its core principle rather than treating it as optional. This design choice gives FastAPI leverage for I/O bound workloads such as db access, external API calls and real-time data streaming. - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Streamlit and FastAPI, you can also consider the following products

Anvil.works - Build seriously powerful web apps with all the flexibility of Python. No web development experience required.

Flask - a microframework for Python based on Werkzeug, Jinja 2 and good intentions.

Gradio - Build & share machine learning apps delightfully.

ExpressJS - Sinatra inspired web development framework for node.js -- insanely fast, flexible, and simple

Hugging Face - The AI community building the future. The platform where the machine learning community collaborates on models, datasets, and applications.

Django - The Web framework for perfectionists with deadlines