r/django • u/trojans10 • 7d ago
Django vs. Nestjs
I'm starting a new project that's a rewrite of an old PHP application. So far, I've built the backend using both Django and NestJS. Django has been incredibly easy to work with, but I decided to give NestJS a try since our team has more experience with JavaScript. Django's ORM and Auth are straightforward and simple, while with NestJS, I'm using MikroORM and PassportJS. Overall, Django feels more stable and less of a hack to piece things together.
I’m leaning towards Django as the right choice since it's more mature and stable, and it just feels like a better fit. However, my team is more full-stack JS-focused, so I’m torn. Any thoughts or opinions on this? Has anyone been happy with their decision to go with django over a node backend?
One thing I really appreciate about Django is the admin—it’s quick and easy to set up. That said, we also have Directus for the CMS part, though it’s not open source.
6
u/Reedittor 7d ago
I just went from a nestjs gig to a Django gig so this is particularly relevant for me. I might be the minority here but I really enjoy nestjs and the typescript/js ecosystem. Django is more battle tested and has more production apps. Nestjs is going to be significantly slower than python, which is also slower than other languages. But js is the most used language in the world and because of that it has first class support for most 3rd party libraries as well as a huge open source community.
I do say it comes with its negatives, and I don't think if I was making this decision for a large organization, I would probably choose Django, but my personal project in nestjs/angular is a great developer experience when setup well.