Django Applications – Top 10 Django Apps

Django has a wide and highly contributing community. It is also widely adopted as a preferred framework while developing web applications. There is a common notion about Django that only startup companies use the framework. Let us look at some of the top companies that use Django as their web application framework.

Top Django Applications

1. Disqus

Disqus is a blog comment plugin for websites and forums which offers various features such as user profiles, spam moderation, advertising analytics, and mobile comments.

In 2013, Disqus handled around 8 billion pages per month, i.e. 45,000 requests per second. It is one of the largest projects ever built using Django from scratch.

Disqus adopted the framework to build an internal tool called Sentry for fixing app crashes, debugging, and error handling. Popular companies such as Reddit, Doordash, Prezi , Instagram adopt Sentry today. Although Disqus is using other frameworks as well, it mainly uses Django for the sole reason of multiple ready-to-implement options.

2. Instagram

Instagram is a social media network that allows you to share videos and photos. It is by far the largest deployment of Django Framework. The main reason for choosing Django by Instagram Developers was its ready-to-implement feature and scalability, so they could focus on the UI/UX of the application. Instagram handles enormous media data and user interaction requests. It also uses Sentry as its internal tool to handle error reporting.

Instagram users share over 90 million videos and photos per day. As of 2021, Instagram boasts around 1 billion active users.

3. Spotify

Spotify is the world’s leading music streaming platform with a customer base of 381 million monthly active users.
They choose Django as their preferred framework for three reasons :

• Fast Backend
• Scalability
• Ability to Integrate Machine Learning

Spotify provides auto-generated playlists and helps discover new artists based on your listening.

4. YouTube

Youtube was first built with PHP, but scalability became an issue with a large audience.

Later, YouTube switched to Django and scalability isn’t an issue anymore. Youtube handles 500 hours of new data uploads every minute. With Django’s CDN Integration, Youtube even supports 4k playback. YouTube users consume around 440,000 Terabytes of data daily.

5. Mozilla

Mozilla MDN Documentation Website is made with Django. It happens to be the second most popular browser after Google Chrome. Mozilla’s Add-ons Store has switched to Django, it was originally made with CAKE PHP. MDN is preferred by developers as a go-to documentation site while learning new technologies. It also has a nice user interface which you wouldn’t find among any other documentation sites.

6. The Washington Post

The Washington Post was entirely written in Django. It is one of the most influential newspapers, and it has to handle huge traffic.

Django was chosen as their preferred framework due to the scalability it provides. As of 2021, the website still continues to maintain 172 million active users every month.

After the Washington Post, Django was adopted by other newspaper organizations such as The Guardian, The Onion, and New York Times.

7. BitBucket

If you’re learning Django, chances are you must have come across the word “git” or version control system. BitBucket is a Cloud Version Control System that was launched in 2008. BitBucket enables you to push and pull code to your remote repository.

You can collaborate easily with other developers. It is one of the heavily loaded Django Web Applications. Django was chosen as their preferred framework for its ready-to-implement feature.

8. Dropbox

Dropbox is a cloud storage technology written in Python. It allows you to store your files over the cloud. Dropbox is mainly preferred over other cloud technologies for the simplicity and speed that it offers. Later Dropbox adopted Django Framework to add features such as User History Option, Synchronization, and File Sharing.

9. Eventbrite

Eventbrite was launched in 2006. It is a platform to manage events and ticketing services. It was originally built in python and later in 2010 developers decided to migrate to Django due to the large audience base. Eventbrite Blog mentioned that some of the immediate benefits of migrating to Django were:

• Ability to request middleware
• URL routing
• Form building
• Database model abstraction
• Unit test framework

10. Pinterest

Pinterest is a social media platform that lets users pin and find ideas according to their preferences. It concentrates mainly on topics related to art, cooking, fashion, etc. As of 2021, Pinterest maintains a roughly 250 million monthly active user base. Django’s ability to scale was the main reason it was chosen as their preferred framework.

Summary

In this tutorial, we have covered top Django Applications and companies that adopt Django as their framework. The main reason most companies use Django is its scalability and ready-to-implement feature.