Django REST Framework
Django REST Framework (DRF) is the toolkit for building Web APIs on top of Django, maintained by Encode OSS Ltd (Tom Christie's org), funded via Open Collective. Current release: 3.17.1 (March 24, 2026), after 3.17.0 dropped Python 3.9/coreapi and added Django 6.0 + Python 3.14 support; requires Python 3.10+, Django 4.2-6.0. Licensed BSD-3-Clause, free and open source. DRF's serializer/viewset/router stack is entirely synchronous — no native async views, a structural limit teams hit scaling I/O-bound endpoints. Adoption: 30.1k GitHub stars, ~28M PyPI downloads/month. Informal 2026 benchmarks: DRF ~8,000-12,000 req/s on JSON endpoints vs FastAPI's 30,000-40,000 req/s. Current version/status: 3.17.1 (March 24, 2026). License: BSD-3-Clause. Maintained by Encode OSS Ltd (Tom Christie et al.), funded via Open Collective.
Pick DRF when you're already running Django and need CRUD APIs fast — the serializer/permission/viewset stack, browsable API, and admin integration save weeks versus hand-rolling auth and pagination. Skip it for greenfield async-heavy or high-throughput services (webhooks, streaming, microservices): FastAPI's native async and Pydantic validation beat DRF's synchronous core on raw req/s, and Django Ninja gets you FastAPI-style typing without leaving Django's ORM and admin. DRF's own architecture admits it: no first-class async views, full stop. Known weakness: DRF's serializer/viewset stack is fully synchronous with no native async view support, forcing I/O-bound endpoints through Django's async-to-sync adapter and capping throughput well below async-native frameworks — a gap the project has not closed through the 3.17 series.