Compare Pyramid and TurboGears

Pyramid is a web framework that is written in Python and is based on WSGI. It is minimalistic and inspired by Zope, Pylons, and Django. Before 2010, Pyramid was known as repoze.bfg.

TurboGears was born as a full stack layer on top of Pylons, and many other disparate libraries and middleware. It is now a standalone WSGI web framework designed around MVC architecture inspired by Ruby on Rails and provides all the features developes need for web development. It can also run in minimal mode and act like a microframework such as Flask.

Let's see how Pyramid and TurboGears compare on various factors and features and which to choose when.

Pyramid

TurboGears

Overall

Type

Type

Python "microframework" for building web applications.

Type

A full-stack web application framework for Python.

Author

Author

Chris McDonough

Author

Kevin Dangoor

Release Date

Release Date

2008

Release Date

2005

License

License

BSD license

License

MIT License

Website

Website

trypyramid.com

Website

turbogears.org

Adoption and Ease of Use

Popularity [?]

Used by 8,000 projects.

Popularity [?]

Used by 500 projects.

Used by

Used by

Reddit, Yelp, Mozilla, SurveyMoney, NewCars.com.

Used by

Used at SourceForge, Fedora Community and other smaller companies.

Jobs [?]

Jobs [?]

80 job openings which list Pyramid as a requirement.

Jobs [?]

3 job openings which list TurboGears in the job description.

Performance [?]

Performance [?]

Claims to have top-notch performance but virtue of being a microframework but benchmarks prove it to be slower than even Django beyond simple use cases.

Performance [?]

Not as performant as barebones or even fullstack frameworks. Extensions could impact performance adversely.

Flexibility

Flexibility

Pyramid is flexible.

Flexibility

Developers can use TurboGears as a microframework which is very flexible. However, as you start building towards a fullstack solution, it does expect things to be done in a certain way.

Ease of Learning

Ease of Learning

Being a microframework, the learning curve isn't very steep. However, it doesn't have the same amount of tutorials, courses, and resources available for leaning compared to Django and Flask

Ease of Learning

Has a learning but since it uses a lot of exisitng 3rd party libraries it becomes are little easier to onboard. It also has a decent amount of tutorials online.

Database Support

RDBMS Support

RDBMS Support

Through Plugins or Extensions

No built-in ORM framework. Leaves it up to developers to choose a library like SQLAlchemy

RDBMS Support

Built-in

Ships with SQLAlchemy with Master Slave load Balancing. Before TurboGears v2, the ORM used as SQLObject.

NoSQL Support

NoSQL Support

Doesn't get in the way of using NoSQL, and they are supported just as well as a relational database. Read more here.

NoSQL Support

Supports MongoDB out of the box using Ming ORM. Ming ORM was developed to look like SQLAlchemy so it's easier for developers familiar with SQLAlchemy to start using it.

Web & Core Features

Admin Dashboard

Admin Dashboard

Through Plugins or Extensions

Doesn't ship with one but 3rd party tools are available.

Admin Dashboard

Built-in

Built-in admin panel.

REST Support

REST Support

Because it is a minimal framework, users can build a REST API themselves easily, or use a 3rd party library like Cornice.

REST Support

Built-in support using tg.controllers.RestController. Read this guide to implement.

Security

Security

Built-in protection against CSRF, but XSS vulnerabilities have been discovered in older versions.

Security

Little built-in protection. Must be handled by developers themselves or by using 3rd party extensions.

Templating Library

Templating Library

Doesn't ship with a default templating language and leaves it up to developers to add one. Jinja2 can be added to Pyramid. Another engine popular amongst Pyramid users is Chameleon .

Templating Library

Ships with internally developed Kajiki templating engine, but supports multiple templating engine including Genshi.

Web Forms

Web Forms

No built-in support. Prefers 3rd party Deform library.

Web Forms

TurboGears relies on ToscaWidgets2 for building and validating forms.

Authentication

Authentication

Built-in support for authentication, authorization and session.

Authentication

Ships with repoze.who which is an authentication and identity framework for WSGI applications. Read more here.

Testing

Testing

Uses pytest for unit testing.

Testing

Using Nose. Read more here.

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