I'm a really happy Django user for 15 years and hopefully I'll still use it for at least another 15!
Django has a lot of beloved features but I think one of the most important is it's stability through the years: I actually have production apps that started on Django 1.4 and python 2.6 and now are updated and with with Django 5 and python 3.13.
All this without too much effort on my side or paying companies to support my projects.
I’ve used Django since 0.96 and keep coming back to it any time I need a web site that works. I’ve dabbled in other stuff but this one just clicks for me.
What is missing? The ORM works with asyncio, you can have async views, you can have long running connection-oriented async stuff for websockets etc (via django channels). Maybe there is something important that I'm missing but that seems more complete than most async-only frameworks.
That project (a local one to me; was created the next county over in the KC metro) put a lot of food on my table and made a lot of value for my business partners. Happy birthday!
In a very real sense, I have Django to thank for my entire career. As an undergraduate, my first academic job in a research lab had me building websites to promote the research in a lab. Django was brand new, and I was uninterested in petty concerns like stability and security, so I did everything in Django.
Years later (2009), I got to do interesting work in a cutting edge machine learning lab due to the expertise I developed in Django -- I was accepted into the lab specifically to clean up the mess phd students had made trying to build a complex front end using Django's ORM with physically separate per-user MySQL database servers.
All the things that came after -- being the first full time employee at a machine learning spinout from the lab, getting acquired by a big company and scaling up sensor-driven ML in the real world, quitting to co-found an ML-centered VC fund, starting a (now 10 year old) AI company -- none of it would have happened without Django.
Same here! Django was not only the first piece of software that allowed me to do real freelancing and software development, but also exposed me to high-quality Python source code and development practices taken from the development team.
Same here. Built first web application in Django, have tried all the other frameworks over the years, and am now back to building another webapp in Django...
I also started my programming career thanks to Django, and I started using it while working at a local newspaper, so bonus points there! We built a system that our sales people could book ads, and then we could layout the newspaper through a canvas based tool (used Fabric.js for that), and then send the pages + ad stack to InDesign to be built. Was great to work with the whole process and Django was really never a limitation. I ended up moving on, but it'll always have a place in my heart.
I've worked in Django across most of my career at a few places for many years.
Every time I work with another framework I am reminded of how well Django has adhered to initial principles (batteries included) while adapting to changes with new technologies.
It has a great community behind it and for that to exist for so long is something remarkable. Other frameworks have advantages in some places. But for overall tooling I think it still is the best choice for anything large and complex yet not a bad choice for micro projects either.
django is the framework that made me fall in love with software development 18y ago.
everything just worked out of the box (compared to using java + spring and their endless xml config files), the orm was (and still is!) lovely compared to other solutions, and there were so many things included, that i never really had to go integration hell.
They didn't manage to get a blog post that doesn't scroll horizontally in Samsung Internet on my Galaxy A54. Exciting times, but there is work to be done.
Django was the whole start of my career and I still thank it for many of my opportunities. I started in 2012 to work with Django at Billogram, then founded a Django consultancy which lead me to work at King 3 years later.
Who knows where I would be today if not for Django!
Out of curiosity, for people who have do projects in both Django and Ruby on Rails, which one would you prefer and why?
I learned Python more than 10 years ago, but later chose Rails to be my first web framework to learn, as I also wanted to learn more about Ruby, hence the question.
As someone who has used quite a few MVC frameworks professionally, in my opinion, Ruby on Rails continues to be the gold standard in many ways. Django feels more like a toy framework which, if I may say so, appeals mostly to developers who picked up Python as undergrads and then were not impelled in their particular careers to master other languages.
Working with Django for the past 15 years has been a pleasure. Joining the community was a revelation. Serving on the board and as president of the DSF was a privilege. I look forward to 20 more years of code and community.
Love django. Whats the consensus on best way to use django in 2025? I've been going the headless route. Django for the backend and using vite or nextjs on the frontend with openapi specs auto-generated.
I wanted to like HTMX and Alpine. But after a few medium sized projects with it I went back to vite/react for larger frontend. I found it so difficult to come back to old htmx/alpine code. If you got a complex UI to maintain I would personally recommend the React route. It is very easy to setup with Django.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 136 ms ] threadDjango has a lot of beloved features but I think one of the most important is it's stability through the years: I actually have production apps that started on Django 1.4 and python 2.6 and now are updated and with with Django 5 and python 3.13.
All this without too much effort on my side or paying companies to support my projects.
So thank you Django people for the hard work!
Here’s to another 20!
Django's request.GET and request.POST were directly influenced by $_GET and $_POST.
Django's template language included ideas from the Smarty PHP template language.
Years later (2009), I got to do interesting work in a cutting edge machine learning lab due to the expertise I developed in Django -- I was accepted into the lab specifically to clean up the mess phd students had made trying to build a complex front end using Django's ORM with physically separate per-user MySQL database servers.
All the things that came after -- being the first full time employee at a machine learning spinout from the lab, getting acquired by a big company and scaling up sensor-driven ML in the real world, quitting to co-found an ML-centered VC fund, starting a (now 10 year old) AI company -- none of it would have happened without Django.
Also, how on Earth did the ML PhDs decide physically segregated databases for each user were a requirement?
didnt they hear about sqlite, great for this setup
Every time I work with another framework I am reminded of how well Django has adhered to initial principles (batteries included) while adapting to changes with new technologies.
It has a great community behind it and for that to exist for so long is something remarkable. Other frameworks have advantages in some places. But for overall tooling I think it still is the best choice for anything large and complex yet not a bad choice for micro projects either.
I have to say thank you to Simon and the Django community as a whole.
Its a wonderful "batteries included" framework that has launched many successful projects, companies, and careers. Mine included.
And I'd be lying if I didnt say I still use pgadmin as my benchmark for evaluating admin panels in other ecosystems.
What you all created with Django is amazing.
We'd all be much further behind in tech without it.
Thanks absolute heaps.
everything just worked out of the box (compared to using java + spring and their endless xml config files), the orm was (and still is!) lovely compared to other solutions, and there were so many things included, that i never really had to go integration hell.
Who knows where I would be today if not for Django!
I learned Python more than 10 years ago, but later chose Rails to be my first web framework to learn, as I also wanted to learn more about Ruby, hence the question.
I celebrated the 20th birthday yesterday by writing up an annotated transcript of my talk from the 10th - it tells Django's origin story: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/13/django-birthday/
I've only worked with Express js as an alternative and I just love how Django handles lots of things for you and let's you focus on the core logic.
I was still at uni (2008) when I got my first PHP job. I've shown Django to my boss. He's never started another PHP project since.
Django is now older than I was when I first used it. To another 20 years.