12 Popular Open-Source Python Frameworks for Web, Networking, and Data Processing

Today we present twelve of the most popular open‑source Python frameworks found on GitHub and other repositories, covering event‑driven I/O, OLAP, web development, high‑performance networking, testing, crawling, and more.

1. Django

Django is a free, open‑source Python web‑application framework that follows the MVC pattern, licensed under a BSD‑style license. It offers strong database integration, an extensible admin interface, a powerful templating system, and works well with caching solutions such as Memcached.

Project address: https://github.com/haiiiiiyun/awesome-django-cn

2. Tornado

Tornado is a scalable, non‑blocking web server, application framework, and asynchronous networking library originally developed at FriendFeed (later acquired by Facebook). It provides a flexible environment for developers and includes a WSGI server for other Python WSGI applications. Licensed under Apache 2.0.

Project address: http://www.tornadoweb.org/en/stable/

3. Twisted

Twisted is an event‑driven networking framework supporting many protocols (TCP, UDP, SSL/TLS, HTTP, IMAP, SSH, IRC, FTP, etc.) and Unix domain sockets, released under the MIT license. It also ships a WSGI server for running other Python web applications.

Project address: https://twistedmatrix.com/trac/

4. Pulsar

Pulsar, originating from eBay, is a highly scalable, high‑availability, event‑driven real‑time analytics and stream‑processing platform that enables asynchronous servers to run multiple activities across processes or threads.

Project address: https://pypi.org/project/pulsar/

5. Bottle

Bottle is a simple, fast, WSGI‑compliant micro‑framework consisting of a single file with no dependencies beyond the Python standard library.

Project address: http://www.bottlepy.org/docs/dev/

6. Diesel

Diesel is a Greenlet‑based event I/O framework offering a clean API for building network clients and servers with support for TCP and UDP. Its non‑blocking design makes it fast and easy to scale.

Project address: https://pypi.org/project/diesel/

7. NumPy

NumPy (Numerical Python) provides the ndarray object for multi‑dimensional arrays with vectorized operations, offering fast, memory‑efficient computation and a rich library of mathematical functions for array manipulation.

Project address: http://www.numpy.org/

8. Scrapy

Scrapy is a high‑level Python framework for web crawling and data extraction, suitable for data mining, monitoring, and automated testing. It is lightweight, easy to use, and highly extensible.

Project address: https://scrapy.org/

9. Cubes

Cubes is a lightweight Python framework that provides OLAP, multidimensional data analysis, and aggregated data browsing capabilities.

Project address: http://cubes.databrewery.org/explore.html

10. Falcon

Falcon is a high‑performance Python framework for building cloud APIs, encouraging a RESTful style with minimal effort for maximum results.

Project address: http://falconframework.org/

11. Web2py

Web2py, originally derived from Google’s web.py and compatible with Google App Engine, is a full‑featured Python web framework designed for rapid, secure, and portable development with built‑in database support.

Project address: http://www.web2py.com/

12. Zerorpc

Zerorpc is a high‑performance distributed RPC framework built on ZeroMQ and MessagePack, providing a Service API (zeroservice) for remote procedure calls via programming or command line.

Project address: http://www.zerorpc.io/

For further reading, see the linked articles on the strongest Python web frameworks, the 15 most popular Python open‑source frameworks, and various Python automation scripts.