Django is batteries-included with ORM, admin panel, authentication, and templating built-in. It excels at content-heavy applications and rapid prototyping.
FastAPI is modern and lightweight, built on Starlette and Pydantic. It leverages type hints for automatic API documentation and validation. Designed for high-performance REST APIs.
Choose Django for: full admin interface, ORM with migrations, built-in auth, templating, and a mature ecosystem.
Choose FastAPI for: REST APIs, automatic documentation, high concurrency with async/await, WebSocket support, and microservices architecture.
Both support SQLAlchemy. Django uses its own ORM. FastAPI is faster for I/O-bound tasks. Django has more third-party packages. FastAPI has better developer experience for API-first projects.