FastAPI vs Django

So after using both Django for a project and FastAPI for another, I want to document what I learned from both.

Django hands you an ORM, an admin panel, authentication, templating, and a very structured opinion on how a project should be laid out. When I built AirHockey, the assignment asked for Django, which fit well: there was a real website developed by my teammates that wrapped around the game, with pages and accounts and a leaderboard, and Django gives us all of that plumbing.

FastAPI is leaner. It is async-first, built for APIs rather than whole websites, and it validates request and response shapes straight from plain Python type hints while generating interactive docs on its own. For NOMU I needed a thin, fast backend to run machine-learning inference and stream results to Unity with as little latency as possible. FastAPI was perfect for that, just quick endpoints each doing one job well.

TL;DR: Django when building a whole website and want structure. FastAPI for a fast, focused API where you assemble the endpoints manually.