Compare Tornado and TurboGears

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.

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 Tornado and TurboGears compare on various factors and features and which to choose when.

Tornado

TurboGears

Overall

Type

Type

Python web framework and asynchronous networking library, which does non-blocking I/O.

Type

A full-stack web application framework for Python.

Author

Author

Ben Darnell

Author

Kevin Dangoor

Release Date

Release Date

2009

Release Date

2005

License

License

Apache License

License

MIT License

Website

Website

www.tornadoweb.org

Website

turbogears.org

Adoption and Ease of Use

Popularity [?]

Used by 145,000 projects.

Popularity [?]

Used by 500 projects.

Used by

Used by

FriendFeed, Turntable.fm, Fantamaster.it

Used by

Used at SourceForge, Fedora Community and other smaller companies.

Jobs [?]

Jobs [?]

300 job openings which list Tornado as a requirement.

Jobs [?]

3 job openings which list TurboGears in the job description.

Performance [?]

Performance [?]

Excellent performance.

Performance [?]

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

Flexibility

Flexibility

Tornado is simple and 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

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

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

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

Built-in

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

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

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

No or Limited Support

No built-in admin panel. No well-known 3rd party tools either.

Admin Dashboard

Built-in

Built-in admin panel.

REST Support

REST Support

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

REST Support

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

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

Little built-in protection. 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

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

Web Forms

Web Forms

No built-in support.

Web Forms

TurboGears relies on ToscaWidgets2 for building and validating forms.

Authentication

Authentication

Provides user authentication and also supports 3rd party authentication and authorization systems like Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc.

Authentication

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

Testing

Testing

Built-in support using Python's unittest framework.

Testing

Using Nose. Read more here.

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