Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Streamlit VS Shiny

Compare Streamlit VS Shiny and see what are their differences

Streamlit logo Streamlit

Turn python scripts into beautiful ML tools

Shiny logo Shiny

Shiny is an R package that makes it easy to build interactive web apps straight from R.
  • Streamlit Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-07
  • Shiny Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-06-30

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.

Shiny features and specs

  • Interactive Web Applications
    Shiny allows for the creation of interactive web applications directly from R, facilitating dynamic data visualization and user engagement without requiring extensive web development knowledge.
  • Ease of Use
    Shiny provides a high-level interface that allows users to create complex applications with minimal code, leveraging R's capabilities and intuitive declarative syntax.
  • Integration with R
    As a product of Posit (formerly RStudio), Shiny seamlessly integrates with the R ecosystem, enabling users to incorporate statistical analysis and machine learning models into their web applications.
  • Customizable UI
    Shiny offers a range of UI components and the ability to integrate custom HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, allowing for highly customized and polished web applications.
  • Reactive Programming
    Shiny’s reactive programming model simplifies the process of building interactive applications by automatically updating output whenever input changes, reducing the need for manual event handling.
  • Community Support
    Shiny has a large and active community, offering plentiful resources such as tutorials, examples, and forums for troubleshooting and learning.

Possible disadvantages of Shiny

  • Performance
    Shiny applications may suffer from performance issues, especially with large datasets or complex operations, as R is single-threaded by nature and may not handle high concurrency well.
  • Scalability
    Scaling Shiny applications to handle large numbers of users can be challenging and may require additional infrastructure, such as Docker containers or server clusters, and careful resource management.
  • Limited Language Support
    Shiny primarily supports R, which may be a limitation for teams or projects that rely on other languages for data analysis or web development.
  • Learning Curve
    Despite its user-friendly design, there is still a learning curve for users new to R or web development concepts, particularly when dealing with more advanced features or customizations.
  • Dependency Management
    Managing dependencies and ensuring version compatibility can become complex, particularly as applications grow in size and sophistication.
  • Deployment Complexity
    Deploying Shiny applications for production use can be complex, requiring knowledge of server environments, containerization, and continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) practices.

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 Shiny

Overall verdict

  • Shiny is generally considered a strong and effective tool for building interactive data visualizations and applications, particularly within the R environment. Its ease of use, flexibility, and ability to integrate with various data sources and other technologies make it a valuable tool for data scientists and statisticians.

Why this product is good

  • Shiny is a popular framework used for building interactive web applications directly from R, making it accessible to R users who want to create interactive web content without having deep knowledge of web development. It is highly favored because it allows for rapid prototyping, leverages the vast ecosystem of R packages, and provides built-in support for reactive programming. The framework enables users to create dynamic visualizations and applications that can be shared easily. It also has strong community support and extensive documentation, making it easier for beginners to learn and implement complex functionalities.

Recommended for

    Shiny is recommended for data scientists, statisticians, and R programmers who want to create interactive web applications for data analysis and visualization. It is particularly useful for those who already have experience with R and are looking to share their findings or analyses interactively with others. It is also beneficial for educators and researchers who need to create accessible, web-based applications to demonstrate data-driven insights.

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

Shiny videos

SHINY - PS4 REVIEW

More videos:

  • Review - My Opinion on EVERY Shiny Pokémon [Generation 1 to 7]
  • Review - Review: Shiny (PlayStation 4) - Defunct Games
  • Tutorial - R Shiny Overview & Tutorial

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Streamlit and Shiny)
Developer Tools
60 60%
40% 40
Web Frameworks
0 0%
100% 100
Productivity
100 100%
0% 0
Content Creators
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

Share your experience with using Streamlit and Shiny. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
Log in or Post with

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Streamlit should be more popular than Shiny. It has been mentiond 209 times since March 2021. 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 (209)

  • Build Code-RAGent, an agent for your codebase
    The only thing left to do then was to build something that could showcase the power of code ingestion within a vector database, and it immediately clicked in my mind: "Why don't I ingest my entire codebase of solved Go exercises from Exercism?" That's how I created Code-RAGent, your friendly coding assistant based on your personal codebases and grounded in web search. It is built on top of GPT-4.1, powered by... - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
  • How AI is Transforming Front-End Development in 2025!
    Streamlit.io: Great documentation and reusable components to integrate with your AI application for rapid python front-end AI development. - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
  • Querying DynamoDB with Natural Language Using MCP
    The agent uses MCP to translate this into a DynamoDB query. Then, using Streamlit UI, results are returned in a structured format, making it easy to use. - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • Can I run this LLM?
    It's powered by something called "Streamlit" (https://streamlit.io). > A faster way to build and share data apps Website doesn't even load for me. I don't even know what to say...welcome to web dev 2025 edition. - Source: Hacker News / 3 months ago
  • Vaadin Flow for AdminUI
    Since Vaadin is Java-focused, its major benefits are best realized within that ecosystem. If you're using .NET, Blazor might be a better fit, while in the Python world, a lightweight alternative could be Streamlit. - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
View more

Shiny mentions (34)

  • Big Book of R
    There is a lot of way and the most common is shiny (https://shiny.posit.co/) but with a biais towards data app. Not having a Django-like or others web stack python may have talks more about the users of R than the language per se. Its background was to replace S which was a proprietary statistics language not to enter competition with Perl used in CGI and early web. R is very powerful and is Lisp in disguise... - Source: Hacker News / about 2 months ago
  • React for R
    In R, you can build Single Page Applications with Shiny, created by Posit https://shiny.posit.co/ It is very useful, if you don't know HTML,JS,CSS and want to create an interactive dashboard, showcasing your analysis, models, visualizations, or even to create an internal tool for your organization. It seems that reactR provides functions for building react components directly from R that can be used in Shiny apps. - Source: Hacker News / 9 months ago
  • R: Introduction to Data Science
    A lighterweight alternative to renv is to use Posit Public Package Manage (https://packagemanager.posit.co/) with a pinned date. That doesn't help if you're installing packages from a mix of places, but if you're only using CRAN packages it lets you get everything as of a fixed date. And of course on the web side you have shiny (https://shiny.posit.co), which now also comes in a python flavour. - Source: Hacker News / about 1 year ago
  • Reflex – Web apps in pure Python
    Sometimes the war is lost even before the battle begins. During grad school, I wrote a whole bunch of web apps entirely in R using Shiny. It was clunky as hell, but yeah, it worked. I went looking for what's up with Shiny these days and found this - https://shiny.posit.co/ So yeah, full on pivot into python. Pip install shiny. Alright! "No web development skills required. Develop web apps entirely in R I mean... - Source: Hacker News / almost 2 years ago
  • PSA: You don't need fancy stuff to do good work.
    Python's pandas, NumPy, and SciPy libraries offer powerful functionality for data manipulation, while matplotlib, seaborn, and plotly provide versatile tools for creating visualizations. Similarly, in R, you can use dplyr, tidyverse, and data.table for data manipulation, and ggplot2, lattice, and shiny for visualization. These packages enable you to create insightful visualizations and perform statistical analyses... Source: about 2 years ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Streamlit and Shiny, 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.

Node.js - Node.js is a platform built on Chrome's JavaScript runtime for easily building fast, scalable network applications

Recut - Edit silence out of videos automatically

Django - The Web framework for perfectionists with deadlines

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.

Ruby on Rails - Ruby on Rails is an open source full-stack web application framework for the Ruby programming...