Compare web2py and TurboGears

web2py was originally designed as a teaching tool, but it gained adoption outside of the academic world. It is a full-stack framework containing all the components needed to build fully functional web applications using the Model View Controller (MVC) pattern. Inspired by the Ruby on Rails and Django. It is not very popular right now but was ranked amongst top Python web frameworks in 2011.

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 web2py and TurboGears compare on various factors and features and which to choose when.

web2py

TurboGears

Overall

Type

Type
Python full-stack for building web applications.
Type
A full-stack web application framework for Python.

Author

Author
Kevin Dangoor - Author of TurboGears
Kevin Dangoor

Release Date

Release Date
2007
Release Date
2005

License

License
MIT License

Website

Website
www.web2py.com
Website
turbogears.org
Adoption and Ease of Use

Popularity [?]

Popularity [?]
0.5 Star
Used by 36 projects.
Popularity [?]
0.5 Star
Used by 500 projects.

Used by

Used by
Not in use at any large company.
Used by
Used at SourceForge, Fedora Community and other smaller companies.

Jobs [?]

Jobs [?]
0.5 Star
8 job openings which list web2py as a requirement.
Jobs [?]
0 Stars
3 job openings which list TurboGears in the job description.

Performance [?]

Performance [?]
3 Stars
Web2py takes a unique approach where models and controllers are executed in a single global environment, which is initialized at each HTTP request. While there are pros to this approach, such as developers never having to worry about cleaning up or avoid conflict between requests, the major disadvantage is that the code is models is executed with every request which carries a performance penalty.
Performance [?]
2.5 Stars
Not as performant as barebones or even fullstack frameworks. Extensions could impact performance adversely.

Flexibility

Flexibility
3 Stars
Not as flexible as microframeworks, but doesn't always get in the way.
Flexibility
4.5 Stars
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
2 Stars
Limited online tutorials and resources, and many are several years old. The best resource for learning is web2py author's own "web2py Complete Reference Manual", which seems to be written in 2013.
Ease of Learning
5 Stars
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
Built-in Support
Built-in
Ships with a Database Abstraction Layer (DAL) which supports MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, and many other relational databases.
RDBMS Support
Built-in 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. Very limited support for NoSQL databases. Currently, it only supports Google Datastore on the Google App Engine.
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
Built-in Support
Built-in
Yes ships with a built-in admin panel.
Admin Dashboard
Built-in Support
Built-in
Built-in admin panel.

REST Support

REST Support
Has some support.
REST Support
Built-in support using tg.controllers.RestController. Read this guide to implement.

Security

Security
Built-in protection against input injections, XSS, and common vulnerabilities. Read more here. It has known security vulnerabilities. Please see list here.
Security
Little built-in protection. Must be handled by developers themselves or by using 3rd party extensions.

Templating Library

Templating Library
Uses custom web2py templating language out of the box.
Templating Library
Ships with internally developed Kajiki templating engine, but supports multiple templating engine including Genshi.

Web Forms

Web Forms
Built-in support. Read more here.
Web Forms
TurboGears relies on ToscaWidgets2 for building and validating forms.

Authentication

Authentication
Includes a Role Based Access Control mechanism (RBAC), which is sufficient for many use cases.
Authentication
Ships with repoze.who which is an authentication and identity framework for WSGI applications. Read more here.

Testing

Testing
Can be done using Python's unittest framework or using the doctest.
Testing
Using Nose. Read more here.

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