As a beginner when it comes to learning a new language everyone’s favorite is Python. A lot of companies working on different kinds of applications and dealing with millions of users expect a fast, scalable and dynamic website. The choice of programming languages and frameworks is enormous in the market but choosing the best one that fulfills most of the requirements can be a tough task for the organizations. Today, the IT industry is familiar with the popularity of Python language. How easy it is to learn this language and how this language has solved a lot of problems with the organization running different kinds of applications. Python and the frameworks of this language truly deserve hype in the market.
For building highly scalable web applications with a constantly growing audience (e.g. content-based or news sites), Django is one of the most popular web frameworks of Python. The framework is clear and simple, fast and reliable, flexible and scalable. Django has a huge loyal contributing community and this framework helps you to get your job done with fewer lines of code. According to SimilarTech, there were 77, 278 websites built with Django as of May 2019. If you want to know why Django is gaining so much popularity then you should check out some of the famous websites that have grown and evolved using this technology. Let’s take a closer look at the best Django sites out there.
1. Disqus
Disqus is the largest project so far built on the Django framework from scratch. The website allows you to implement comments and discussion options on your site. It offers an easy-to-use plug-in for comments, analyzes audience activity, advertises, and access customer engagement tools. The community has reached nearly 500 million unique visitors every month across 191 countries with more than 17 million monthly page views. Around 750,000 websites using Disqus, with about 35 million users participating in these communities. The website handles more than 50 million comments per month. It’s a Django framework running behind the scene that helped Disqus to scale their application for handling millions of users and for better performance as well.
Disqus team also used this framework to build an internal tool Sentry for error reporting, debugging, and fixing app crashes. Today, Sentry is pretty popular among developers and it has become an open-source software used by 30, 000+ organizations including Instagram, Reddit, Doordash, Datadog, and Prezi. Disqus is now using other frameworks as well, but the team is still working on Django because of the huge community support and a wide selection of ready-to-implement solutions.
2. YouTube
This “video-sharing platform” needs no introduction. Earlier the site was built on Php but the youtube team felt the need to improve its performance and add new functionalities in it. Continuous rapid audience growth forced the youtube team to choose the Django framework and the choice was fully justified. Django helped the YouTube team of developers, allowing them to act quickly & flawlessly. They used this framework to implement new features and to maintain the speed of the website.
3. Instagram
Again this site needs no introduction. Instagram is the fastest-growing photo and video sharing app which is quite popular in the world. Kevin and Mike, co-founders of Instagram developed the first version of this app using Django. It was super easy to work with Django and it didn’t require a lot of decisions and a lot of setups. Every day, Instagram users add 95 million photos and give 4.2 billion likes under the pictures and videos. Django helped Instagram to scale the application, process huge amounts of data and manage a greater number of interactions between users every single second. The ready to implement solution available in Django allowed the team to focus on UI and UX of the app instead of worrying about the backend technology that makes them work. According to Hui Ding, the former head of engineering at Instagram
“We had been able to get to a few hundred million users with our Python/Django stack, so we decided we would continue. Also significant in the decision was that our engineers love Python. It’s a reason people want to come to work for us.”
Instagram uses Sentry tool (developed by Disqus) to monitor and detect errors across the system in real-time.
4. Spotify
This music streaming app changed the way people listen to, share and purchase music. The huge library of this application is accessible everywhere and on any device. It contains a vast amount of data and to handle this data the application uses Python alongside Django. There were mainly two reasons for choosing this framework…
- Fast backend.
- Machine learning options.
To provide users with customized auto-generated playlists, Spotify benefits from Machine Learning with Python. Django provided the full range of Python features to handle the web application.
5. Bitbucket
Forget about the day when your source code was on your machine only. Today Github and Bitbucket are quite popular in the market for hosting your repository online. Bitbucket is a cloud-based Git repository hosting service that was launched in 2008. Today, this platform handles a heavy load of users with 17 million requests and 6 million repositories in a year. The core technology behind this platform is Python paired with Django. Bitbucket uses Django for several reasons. The first one is the thousands of wide and vibrant community of developers. The second reason is Django offers a lot of ready-to-implement solutions that save a lot of time for developers. This way, they don’t have to worry about building every single feature from scratch.
6. DropBox
Dropbox is the most popular cloud-based storage platform for documents, video, pictures, graphics, and so on. The application allows its users to access the files anywhere, anytime and from any device. From the start, Dropbox has been using Python as the main technology in its tech stack and the company also hired the man Guido van Rossum who created Python. The team was able to develop the product relatively fast using Python for both the server and the desktop client software. Dropbox developers choose Django to add the user history option, synchronize an account across different devices, and to add various types of file-sharing options.
7. Mozilla
Mozilla is the second most popular browser in the world so there is no need to say how many people use it. Initially, Php and CakePHP was the core technology stack for Mozilla but later when numbers of users started increasing the platform grew and it had to deal with millions of searches daily. To manage high traffic and to improve efficiency the team had to adopt new technology. So the team decided to move on from PHP+CakePHP to Python+Django. They got the benefit of it and the platform becomes much more capable to handle hundreds of millions of views per month, and even more API hits per day. Today, all the Mozilla support site and the add-ons are powered by Django.
8. Pinterest
Pinterest is another popular social media platform that allows it’s users to find ideas like recipes, home and style inspiration. Pinterest has 250 million monthly active users so the website has to deal with a heavy load of users. To ensure excellent performance the website uses Django. Django provides the ability to scale effectively without affecting its speed. It’s Django behind the scene that helped developers to manage the website, allowing it’s users to follow each other and share boards and pins.
9. The Washington Post
You may be surprised after reading an interesting fact that Django was first created to support the content web app for the Lawrence Journal-World newspaper publisher. Well, the framework is still popular among news apps and it is used by the most influential newspaper in the world, The Washington Post. This popular news app taking advantage of this framework and handles the huge traffic very well with fast and efficient performance. The Washington Post website, which is written solely in Django, hit 172 million total monthly visits in March 2019. Other similar apps such as The Guardian, the satirical newspaper The Onion, and partially by The New York Times also uses the Django framework to scale their website and to handle large amounts of data generated by the daily audience.
10. Eventbrite
Eventbrite is another success story of Django. The website was launched in 2006 and it provides event management and ticketing service. Eventbrite was originally built on Python and in-house frameworks but due to rapid audience growth, the platform started facing scalability issues. In 2010 the developer’s team decided to move on to the Django framework. It helped developers to scale their website and to handle as many hits per second as possible. Django becomes a solid foundation for the future development and growth of the entire Eventbrite website.
The list doesn’t end here. There are still some popular websites using Django in their tech stack and got the benefit of using this framework. Some other popular websites are… Prezi, NASA, National Geographic, Quora, The Onion, Reddit, Udemy, Robinhood and many more are out there.
So Django is a perfect solution for both startups and large companies. Scalability is one of the best features of Django and it enables any application to handle any audience volume growth with efficiency as well. If you aim to deliver the product quickly and at an efficient cost then you should think about using this framework for your next project.
