Compare Tornado and Pyramid

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.

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.

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

Tornado

Pyramid

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
2008

License

License
Apache License
License
BSD license

Website

Website
trypyramid.com
Adoption and Ease of Use

Popularity [?]

Popularity [?]
5 Stars
Used by 145,000 projects.
Popularity [?]
1 Star
Used by 8,000 projects.

Used by

Used by
FriendFeed, Turntable.fm, Fantamaster.it
Used by
Reddit, Yelp, Mozilla, SurveyMoney, NewCars.com.

Jobs [?]

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

Performance [?]

Performance [?]
5 Stars
Excellent performance.
Performance [?]
3 Stars
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.

Flexibility

Flexibility
5 Stars
Tornado is simple and flexible.
Flexibility
4.5 Stars
Pyramid is flexible.

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
4 Stars
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
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

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
Doesn't get in the way of using NoSQL, and they are supported just as well as a relational database. Read more here.
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
Doesn't ship with one but 3rd party tools are available.

REST Support

REST Support
No built-in support for REST API, but users can implement REST APIs manually.
REST Support
Because it is a minimal framework, users can build a REST API themselves easily, or use a 3rd party library like Cornice.

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

Templating Library

Templating Library
Tornado uses custom templating library out of the box.
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 .

Web Forms

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

Authentication

Authentication
Provides user authentication and also supports 3rd party authentication and authorization systems like Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc.
Authentication
Built-in support for authentication, authorization and session.

Testing

Testing
Built-in support using Python's unittest framework.
Testing
Uses pytest for unit testing.

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