Compare Tornado and Bottle

Tornado is a Python web framework and asynchronous networking library developed at FriendFeed. By using non-blocking network I/O, Tornado can scale to tens of thousands of open connections, making it ideal for long polling, WebSockets, and other applications that require a long-lived connection to each user. It is great for use cases that are I/O intensive (e.g., proxies) but not ideal for compute-intensive use cases.

Bottle is a fast, simple and lightweight WSGI micro web-framework for Python. It is distributed as a single file module and has no dependencies other than the Python Standard Library.

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

Tornado

Bottle

Overall

Type

Type
Python web framework and asynchronous networking library, which does non-blocking I/O.
Type
Python microframework for building web applications.

Author

Author
Ben Darnell - Author of Tornado
Ben Darnell

Release Date

Release Date
2009
Release Date
2009

License

License
Apache License
License
MIT License

Website

Website
bottlepy.org
Adoption and Ease of Use

Popularity [?]

Popularity [?]
5 Stars
Used by 145,000 projects.
Popularity [?]
1.5 Stars
Used by 14,000 projects.

Used by

Used by
FriendFeed, Turntable.fm, Fantamaster.it
Used by
No data.

Jobs [?]

Jobs [?]
2.5 Stars
300 job openings which list Tornado as a requirement.
Jobs [?]
1 Star
74 job openings which list Bottle as a requirement.

Performance [?]

Performance [?]
5 Stars
Excellent performance.
Performance [?]
5 Stars
Very fast. Extensions could impact performance adversely.

Flexibility

Flexibility
5 Stars
Tornado is simple and flexible.
Flexibility
5 Stars
Very flexible and extremely simple. Doesn't force anything on developers.

Ease of Learning

Ease of Learning
4 Stars
Tornado is not difficult to learn if the user is familiar with asynchronous and non-blocking I/O. The online resources, courses, and tutorials are not as plentiful compared to Flask or Django.
Ease of Learning
5 Stars
Straightforward and easy to learn. It has a good amount of tutorials online.
Database Support

RDBMS Support

RDBMS Support
Through Plugins or Extensions
Through Plugins or Extensions
Being an asynchronous framework, Tornado doesn't play well with ORM frameworks. See this stackoverflow answer for more details. It doesn't come with a built-in ORM framework, but 3rd party libraries that can be used. Such as tornado-sqlalchemy, Tornado-MySQL (experimental), etc.
RDBMS Support
Through Plugins or Extensions
Through Plugins or Extensions
No built-in ORM framework. Leaves it up to developers to choose a library like SQLAlchemy or extensions such as Macaron.

NoSQL Support

NoSQL Support
No built-in support for NoSQL databases, but 3rd party libraries support asynchronous, non-blocking access. Motor is one such library from the makers of MongoDB. However, a lot of client libraries like DynamoDB appear to have been deprecated or not actively maintained.
NoSQL Support
No built-in support but 3rd party Python libraries like PyMongo or Bottle-Mongo can be used to talk to NoSQL databases.
Web & Core Features

Admin Dashboard

Admin Dashboard
No or Limited Support
No or Limited Support
No built-in admin panel. No well-known 3rd party tools either.
Admin Dashboard
Through Plugins or Extensions
Through Plugins or Extensions
No built-in admin panel.

REST Support

REST Support
No built-in support for REST API, but users can implement REST APIs manually.
REST Support
No built-in support but can be implemented easily.

Security

Security
Built-in security mechanisms such as secure cookies, XSRF, DNS Rebinding and etc. Has been used in production for many years so security is generally decent.
Security
No built-in protection. Bottle is a minimalist framework. Must be handled by developers themselves or by using 3rd party extensions.

Templating Library

Templating Library
Tornado uses custom templating library out of the box.
Templating Library
Fast and pythonic built-in template engine and support for mako, jinja2 and cheetah templating languages.

Web Forms

Web Forms
No built-in support.
Web Forms
No built-in support.

Authentication

Authentication
Provides user authentication and also supports 3rd party authentication and authorization systems like Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc.
Authentication
Using a plugin such as Bottle-Cork

Testing

Testing
Built-in support using Python's unittest framework.
Testing
Using WebTest and Nose.

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