NodeJS vs Python: Choose the Best Backend Technology in 2024-2025

NodeJS vs Python: Overview

Node.js vs Python: When it comes to the technologies for backend development, both Node.js and Python are very popular amongst developers. Each one has the upper hand in some or the other areas, and also it depends solely on the developer’s preference to choose anyone. So, we will carry out a thorough comparison of Node.js vs. Python based on various parameters to determine which one is the best programming language in 2024 and is preferable or best suited for your requirements.

Node.js vs Python: Comparison Table

Let’s have a look at a brief comparison between Node.js and Python. Here’s a quick overview of Node.js vs Python.

Attribute	Node.js	Python
Release date	May 2009	February 1991
Created by	Ryan Dahl	Guido van Rossum
Open-source	Yes	Yes
Architecture	Asynchronous & event-driven	Not event-driven
Speed	Fast	Relatively slower
Scalability	Highly scalable	Not scalable easily
Extensibility	Easily extensible	Easily extensible
Technology	Open-source, cross-platform, back-end JavaScript runtime environment	Interpreted, object-oriented, high-level programming language
Memory Intensive apps	Yes	No
Performance	Super-fast	Fast
Interpreter	JavaScript interpreter	CPython interpreter
Library	Large, open-source, and managed with NPM	Huge, open-source, highly extensive, and managed with Pip
Real-time web applications	Suitable	Not suitable
Project size	Small or medium	Large
Community	Large	Large
Best for	Messaging apps, real-time solutions, SPAs, streaming platforms, etc.	AI/ML apps, business solutions, data science apps, face & voice recognition apps, games, etc.

What is Node.js?

Built on Google Chrome’s JavaScript engine, Node.js is a server-side platform developed in 2009 by Ryan Dahl. Based on Google’s V8 engine, this virtual machine has a built-in interpreter, compiler, optimizer, and more. Mainly developers use Nodejs for the backend for compiling JavaScript backend 8functions into machine code. Wondering is Node js a framework or is Node js a programming language? Well, not exactly, it’s more of a platform for backend development.

All the more reasons that add to the increasing popularity of Node.js include its speed, scalability, and the fact that developers can use it to develop both frontend and backend with a single unified stack. So, companies can use teams with similar skills to develop both front-end and back-end to avoid new hiring, rehiring, etc.

Node.js is popularly used to run real-time server applications, and also it runs on various operating systems including, Microsoft Windows, Linux, OS X, etc. The latest version of Node.js i.e. Node.js v17.0.0 provides multiple refinements that include upgrades for the JavaScript engine, OpenSSL 3.0 support, advanced APIs, and more.

What is Python?

Python is one of the most popular multi-purpose and object-oriented programming languages. It is a high-level and dynamic programming language that is ideal for scripting owing to its dynamic typing with interpreted nature. Being an interpreted language, Code created with Python cannot be converted to a computer-readable code before runtime. Python was released in 1991, and it has been around for over 30 years now, making it a pool of extensive libraries, APIs, and tons of other tools.

Python is mainly used for business applications due to its maturity, huge supportive community, and numerous supporting platforms. From the development of business applications to backend development, Python has widened its reign even to AI development, automation, scientific computing, and big data. Python 3.10 is the latest version released on 5th October 2021 and has been one of the significant feature releases.

Features of Node.js

Node.js has numerous features that make it a popular choice among developers. Let’s have a look at some of the main features:

Event-driven

The event-driven feature of Node.js closely resembles the asynchronous programming’s call-back function. For event-driven programming, Node.js has a module known as “Event.” This module allows the developers to implement event-driven programming with the help of the EventEmitter class. Event-driven programming is one of the sole reasons why Node.js is fast and provides very high performance.

Open-source

In simple terms, Node.js is free to use and can be downloaded and installed from the official website, depending on your system requirements. Being open-source, Node.js is widely used by developers across the globe as they can experiment with it and develop marvelous solutions to meet their requirements by leveraging the benefits of this open-source environment.

Highly scalable

As Node.js applications operate in a non-blocking or asynchronous way, they are highly scalable. Node.js processes only a single request as it works on a single thread. It completely processes a single request, sends a response, and only then accepts the following request to handle it.

Asynchronous

By default, Node.js operates in a non-blocking way, and so it is asynchronous. If we break it down in simple terms, then whenever a client request is received, firstly, it is checked whether database interaction is needed or not. If it is not required, the request is processed, the response is sent to the client, and the thread is ready for the subsequent request.

NPM

NPM or Node Package Manager is the package manager for the Node.js environment. NPM is one of the recommended features in the Node.js installer as well. NPM manages all the local dependencies of any project and has around 50,000 to 80,000 packages in the online public repository, making it the world’s largest online repository.

Single-threaded with event looping

Node.js is entirely based on the “Single Threaded Event Loop Model” to handle multiple client requests. There are separate threads for input-output and the main event. The input-output loop work goes on in the background, while the main event loop handles the single threads and executes them. Also, all the asynchronous operations are allowed by the Event loop.

Object-oriented

Node.js is a prototype-based object-oriented programming language, which means it inherits the prototype of anything defined. So after defining any object, you can either append methods, remove them, or even modify them according to your requirements. In short, you can make any changes once the JavaScript is declared.

Features of Python

Python is a choice of many tech giants, and out of the numerous reasons that led to its popularity, here are a few exciting features of Python,

Open-source

Python being an open-source programming language, anyone is free to create and contribute to the Python community. As it is freely available on the official website, the source code can be downloaded and used as per the developer’s requirements.

Easy coding

With simple syntax and a smooth learning curve, Python is easy to learn and understand. Its tough to find Python equivalent as Python code is easy to understand and write owing to the highly simplified syntax. As Python is easy to learn, it is extensively used for development with easy coding.

Object-oriented

Although Python is an object-oriented language, it supports object-oriented and functional programming. Also, as everything in Python is an object, it follows object-oriented programming concepts such as inheritance, encapsulation, and polymorphism.

Platform independent

Yes, Python is totally platform-independent, which means that whenever we write a program, it will run on various platforms such as Windows, macOS, Linux, and more. Thus, it saves you from the hassle of writing different codes for different platforms of the same application.

Extensive standard library

Python’s standard library is extensive and has a large number of packages and modules that have the most common and important functionalities. This saves your time not writing the code and taking it straight from the existing library. And so, it allows you to lay your focus on more important things.

GUI programming support

Python is used for developing Graphical User Interfaces using various modules such as wxPython, Tk in Python, PyQt5, PyQt4, etc. The most popular and widely used module for Graphical apps is PyQt5.

Integrated and interpreted

Python can be integrated easily with various languages such as C, C++, Java, etc., making it a preferred language for development. Also, Python code is executed line by line at one time, as it is an interpreted language. Thus, there is no need to compile the Python code, making it easier to debug.

Pros and cons of Node.js

Node.js is an entirely event-driven programming language that differs from other dynamic languages. It is different in many ways, and lacks in some aspects, so here are a few pros and cons of Node.js that will allow you to understand it better.

Pros of Node.js

Powerful tech stack

As Node.js is based on JavaScript, the entire JS tech stack is accessible for you. Also, the entire community and all the resources can be used. With Node.js, you can develop projects using MEAN stack that allows you to develop apps using MongoDB for database management, Express.js for backend management, Angular for front-end and user-interface management, and Node.js for backend JS development.

Highly scalable

When it comes to developing highly scalable applications, Node.js is regarded as one of the most viable solutions. Node.js offers complete load balancing, and its runtime environment follows a cluster module. Even the servers work seamlessly as Node.js has an asynchronous event loop mechanism. Also, Node.js allows the addition of extra resources to the existing single nodes when the web applications are scaled vertically.

Event-based fast model

Analyzing the speed of server tools and their efficiency, it was derived by Toptal that Node.js is 2 to 3 times faster than PHP, Java, and Go. Regardless of any user actions, Node.js performs the complete operations algorithm regardless of any user actions as it has event-based programming. So whenever any button is clicked, the user encounters a new page, gets a message, or sees new content as the program runs quickly after the event of the button.

Cost-efficient

As Node.js can be used to develop both front-end and back-end, developers can create applications easily and hassle-free. So, companies don’t need to hire two different resources to develop the front-end and backend of the application. This can allow the companies to save on the overall cost of development. Apart from saving on total development costs, the development process becomes faster without compromising the quality of development.

Highly flexible for microservice development

For microservice architecture, multiple module execution and development are required. Node.js has a package manager with free modules, enabling developers to edit multiple modules simultaneously. By dividing the functionalities and features into micro chunks, companies can maintain high-quality, elevated testing, and numerous features can be updated at once. As an example of migration from monolith to microservice with Node.js, you can see the success of Netflix and PayPal.

Cons of Node.js

Unstable API

One of the significant disadvantages of Node.js is the frequent API switch that makes the backend incompatible. This incompatibility leads directly to the heavy changes in the codes that imply instability. Thus, when it comes to coding with Node.js, the frequent API changes lead to continuous changes in the code that can be highly unstable.

Inability to process CPU bound tasks

Node.js clearly lacks in the execution of heavy computation tasks. Node.js executes on a single thread basis, and so it becomes problematic when it comes to complex CPU-bound task execution. In Node.js, whenever any request is received, the system takes it on priority, processes it, and only then takes up the next request. This results in the slow down of the entire processing system, ending in a massive delay in the event loop.

Callback hell

As Node.js is asynchronous, there is a big issue of nested callback functions that result in the callback hell. After each task in the queue, a callback function is run. Now what happens is that there is a situation where multiple callbacks are nested many levels deep and eventually create a callback hell that lowers the quality of the code. Thus, the code becomes difficult to understand and maintain.

Pros and cons of Python

Python is quite mature and became popular in the programming world owing to its features and extensive library. As everything has a negative aspect, even Python has its pros and cons. So, let’s have a look at them.

Pros of Python

Easy to code and fast development

Python is very easy to understand, learn and code as well. The syntax is relatively straightforward and provides developers with easy readability and quick interpretation of the code. Also, when you are using Python, the lines of code are considerably reduced when you compare it to the competitors. The developers can save time by reusing the required code existing in the extensive library, leading to faster development.

Open-source community

It’s been over 20 years since the inception of Python, and so the Python community is huge and it’s still growing. The Python community is known to be vibrant and highly active amongst other existing communities. Moreover, as Python is open-source, the developers can leverage the community support freely and even contribute to the community by sharing their knowledge.

Highly extensive library

The Python library is so extensive and huge that you can get almost anything and everything in there. From web development to mobile development, and machine learning to game development, you can get almost all the libraries you require. And in case you don’t get a perfect one, you can easily reuse the code from the library to create a custom one.

Flexibility

As Python can integrate with almost any language and or any programming platform in the world, it provides high flexibility when it comes to compatibility. This unmatched flexibility of Python can give the developers support when it comes to integrating various languages and platforms within one project. Some of the examples of Python’s easy integration are, Python which is a Python offshoot for .NET, and C#, CPython is for Python with C, or even PyObjc for Python with Objective-C, etc.

Powerful programming

Python is a compelling programming language as it is versatile and has extensive tools for almost everything. Whether you want to build a traditional web or mobile apps or want to be in the trend with the world and experiment with AI/ML, Python is for you. Some of Python’s modern and complex applications include deep learning, AI/ML, data science, scientific programming, and more.

Cons of Python

Comparatively slow speed

Yes, Python is a tad bit slower when you compare it with other popular languages. Python is an interpreted language and dynamically typed. It executes the code line-by-line, leading to slow execution. Even the dynamic nature of the Python programming language greatly accounts for the lowered speed. So, if speed is your concern, Python is certainly not the one for you.

No native support for the mobile environment

Python is often not the preferred language for mobile application development. The reason is that Python is not native to mobile environments, and so many developers don’t choose it. Also, both Android and iOS don’t officially support mobile computing in Python. No doubt that it can be used for mobile programming, but it will require a bit of additional effort.

Memory consumption

A notable fact while programming in any language or any platform is that the memory consumption should be as low as possible, but in the case of Python, it’s not true. Python has a very high memory consumption which leads to a poor quality solution. This high memory consumption results from errors in freeing up the memory using the garbage collector. So, Python is not recommended to develop memory-intensive apps or tasks.

Bouns Read: Python vs PHP

Node.js vs Python: Use Cases

Use cases of Node.js

With the features of Node.js and the numerous advantages, here are some of the types of applications that can be developed using Node.js.

• Single-page applications
• I/O bound applications
• Data-intensive real-time applications
• JSON APIs based applications
• Data streaming applications

Use cases of Python

Python is known for its maturity and extensive standard open-source library available for developers. This and many other factors have led to Python becoming a popular choice for the development of these kinds of applications,

• Scientific applications
• Business applications
• Educational applications
• GUI development
• Web and internet development

Top apps built with Node.js

Now, let’s have a look at the successful apps built with Node.js

PayPal

With the help of Node.js, PayPal has transformed from being just an online payment service to a payment platform. They migrated from Java to Node.js to enable both server application and browser to be written into JavaScript. PayPal lets its users carry out online transactions easily in over 100 currencies across 200+ markets.

Uber

Uber, a renowned transportation network company that has transformed the meaning of transportation forever, has also used Node.js. Existing in over 85 countries, Uber is one of the first adopters of Node.js. With Node.js, their performance has seen a boost, information processing has become quicker, operational speed has increased, and more.

Netflix

Netflix is the world’s largest video streaming service provider in over 190 countries. It provides videos, movies, series, documentaries, and more for the users. The maker of Netflix wanted it to be fast, lightweight, and a modular application, so they built the entire user interface with Node js backend. With the use of Node.js, the loading time of the web version of Netflix is reduced by 70%.

LinkedIn

The biggest name in the career development and professional networking social media networks, LinkedIn has its mobile app’s server-side powered by Node.js. Apart from these, the number of servers required to run the mobile app was cut down by a factor of 10 times. With Node.js, LinkedIn’s new mobile app is 20 times faster and showcases better performance as well.

Yahoo

Yahoo is a big name with a plethora of services, including a search engine, news, mail, finance, etc. Node.js is mainly used by Yahoo to develop single-page applications and numerous content sites. As Node.js is highly scalable, Yahoo has witnessed an increase in performance, and they were able to manage more than 25,000 requests per second.

eBay

One of the leading shopping websites in America, which is famous for C2C sales, B2C sales, auctions, etc., has used Node.js in its tech stack. The two reasons that guided eBay to embrace Node.js include making applications real-time by maintaining connections with the server live and managing a huge number of services to display information.

Medium

Medium uses Node.js for its web servers. Being an online publishing giant, Medium requires robust web servers that can serve a rich set of content to millions of users. By joining hands with Node.js, Medium was able to amplify the speed of deployment by 15 minutes.

GoDaddy

Being one of the leading publicly traded Internet domain registrars and web hosting companies in the USA, GoDaddy has over 19 million customers worldwide. They have their entire backend on the Node.js infrastructure. With Node.js by their side, GoDaddy can now easily deploy new features, quickly write unit and integration tests, and more.

Mozilla

Mozilla has used Node.js to develop one of the most famous web browsers globally, Mozilla Firefox. Mozilla embraced Node.js for principally two reasons, firstly the same language can be used for client-side and server-side programming. Secondly, because of the memory footprint.

Trello

The best tool for Agile teams nowadays is Trello. It has very intuitive task management and project management to reflect real-time changes. Trello has used Node.js from day one and has leveraged its faster development process and code reusability features.

Top apps built with Python

Here are some of the giants who have embraced Python for their companies.

Facebook

Facebook, which has become social media’s synonym with over a billion active users, has a huge tech stack. An official word from Facebook states that Python takes 21% of the company’s infrastructural codebase. With all the enticing features and a reliable codebase, Python indeed backs up Facebook well to make it on the top of the list.

Instagram

Instagram would not exist without Python. Instagram is built on Django, which is a Python-based web framework. This social media giant is still using Django to provide users with the best platform for securely sharing their photos and videos. As the makers of Instagram suggest, this social media platform is fast, highly secure, and completely scalable. Over the ages, the goodness of Python has elevated this social media platform to one of the most popular ones.

Disqus

One of the widely used commenting plugins is used to boost discussion and engage audiences very effectively, monitoring the content by moderating the comments. With Python, and Django’s all security features, Disqus offers multiple sign-in options, different preferences, cross-site notifications, and more.

Pinterest

Pinterest is one of the most famous bookmarking platforms for users to collect, share, and bookmark images of their interest. To deal with the huge amount of content generated daily, Pinterest relies on Python and Django to keep things smooth. Python has been a solid backbone for Pinterest since day one, and with over 250 million active users, even today, Python is keeping the giant going.

Spotify

Spotify, one of the world’s largest streaming services, enlists itself in the top Python users. Spotify can effectively manage the features based on the users’ personal preferences with the help of Python. Some of the major reasons for choosing Python are its speed, data analytics, and reliability.

Reddit

In the current scenario, Reddit is one of the most impressive apps developed in Python so far. This USA’s discussion website and social news aggregator has more than 430 million monthly active users. Users post their content, images, videos, etc., on this platform in thousands of categories. They comment on it and even vote them up or down.

Dropbox

Dropbox is one of the leading file-hosting services that has recently made news by migrating from Python 2.7 to Python 3.0, which takes its place in the largest Python 3.0 migrations ever. This popular desktop application can be installed on Windows, macOS, and selected versions of Linux.

Quora

Quora is a popular and one of the biggest question-and-answer websites which is built on Python. It is more famous amongst professionals across the globe. The founders are very happy with the transition from PHP to Python. Because of its high development speed, they chose the Python backend framework over others in the late 2000s.

Amazon

As Python is also the best option for machine learning, Amazon has used Python to write a machine learning system that works on the Hadoop database. This cloud computing, ecommerce, and entertainment giant has embraced Python for big data analysis owing to its high scalability.

IBM

IBM’s big data and AI offering – Watson, has its own Python SDK. Yes, this mature tech giant has a close relationship with Python. IBM allows developers to deploy Python web servers on IBM Bluemix. Moreover, IBM has published a free tutorial on Python.

Nodejs vs Python: Detailed Comparison

Now that you are familiar with everything about Python and Node.js, it’s time to carry out their detailed comparison on numerous parameters. Let’s delve into the comparison between NodeJs vs Python.

Performance

Whenever any programming language is to be accessed, performance and speed are two primary factors. After considering all the factors of both Node.js and Python, here’s their performance analysis in brief,

Node.js

After exploring the asynchronous architecture of Node.js, you might have the idea that the entire process from request to execution and response is faster. The performance and speed are extraordinary as the code is executed outside the web browser, enabling faster execution to improve the performance.

Python

In the case of Python, there is only a single drawback in performance: it does not allow multi-threading. As the processes cannot be executed parallelly, the processing speed slows down and affects the overall performance. On the contrary, Python is easy to code, learn, and execute, but it is not recommended for apps requiring frequent data from web servers.

Architecture

Both Node.js and Python have different architectures and so the performance varies accordingly. The architecture of Node.js is single-threaded, thus it manages multiple requests by using a single thread. Whereas, Python follows the standard CPython architecture for replaceable modules.

Node.js

As Node.js follows a server-side asynchronous architecture, parallel processes can be executed, even if the events are occurring. This happens because the input/output and other functions are not blocked even if any threads are in process. Thus, the application deployment is faster.

Python

On the other hand, Python does not support multi-threading. So, in Python, only after one process is complete, the next one will be called. As Python is not inherently asynchronous, therefore issues will be faced when it comes to parallel processing and improvement of the development speed.

Scalability

Whenever you embark on the development of any application or solution, you start with an MVP and that is developed easily by any programming language, framework, or platform. But the real catch is, whether the same speed, smoothness, and performance are maintained when you start to scale your application by adding more features and functionalities. Let’s see that for Node.js and Python.

Node.js

The basis of Node.js is in building different nodes that can be added as and when the requirements arise. These nodes are basically a set of microservices, modules, etc. that run their processes dynamically. So, in the case of Node.js, there is no core around which you need to build, and so it is highly scalable.

Python

For making any app or solution scalable, it is mandatory to enable multi-threading. But in the case of Python, multi-threading is not supported at all as it uses the Global Interpreter Lock. Basically, GIL does not allow the interpreter to execute more than one thread simultaneously. So, Python is dynamically typed with no thread safety, and so it is not recommended for bigger projects, with large development teams.

Extensibility

Extensibility can be simply put as the extent to which features and functionalities can be added to an existing app or system using various third-party tools. Thus, it is mandatory to check whether any language can be modified with the help of third-party tools or not for attaining extensibility.

Node.js

Extensibility can be easily achieved with Node.js. You can very swiftly customize, integrate, or even extend it with various built-in APIs for the development of HTTP or DNS servers. Some of the examples of Node.js integrations are – Babel (JS compiler) for front-end development, PM2, Migrate, Webpack, etc. for process management and data migration, Jasmine for unit testing, etc.

Python

Python is highly extensible as it can be easily integrated with various third-party tools. Python can be integrated with various code editors such as Sublime Text that allow the addition of some editing features or extensions. Apart from this, Python easily integrates with Robot Framework, Django, CherryPy, Flask, Web2Py, Pyramid, etc.

Libraries

The concept of libraries is the pillar that is helping developers across the globe to access the already developed solutions and avoid its recreation. So, almost all the technologies and languages provide a library for the developers to directly integrate the desired code from the library and focus on the new features to be added.

Node.js

The library of Node.js is managed by NPM, the Node Package Manager. Interestingly, NPM is the largest packages repository in the world. This Node.js library is very well-documented, fast, and easily accessible by the developers. Also, it is a very good source of knowledge for the freshers who are looking forward to deep dive into Node.js.

Python

In Python, the standard library is completely maintained by Pip. Pip stands for “Pip installs Python”. Known for its speed and reliability, Pip is also very easy to use, which is a great benefit for the developers. Python libraries are amongst the most well-documented easily deployable libraries in the world.

When should you choose Node.js?

Due to its architecture and the fact that it is completely built on Chrome’s JavaScript runtime environment, Node.js is suitable for developing highly scalable applications. Also, the asynchronous model makes it even more suitable for developing real-time applications that are data intensive. Node.js offers great speed and high performance, making it the right choice for the development of messaging applications, highly loaded applications, and even speed-dependent ecommerce applications.

When should you choose Python?

Python is a really old player, and so it has an extensive library that is open-source, and it consists of testing instruments, data analytics tools, ready modules, web frameworks, etc. Having one of the largest ecosystems in the entire programming community, Python offers newbies a set platform to easily learn the language with numerous resources. Python’s speed lacks a tad bit when it is compared to Node.js, but that does not stop it from developing some of the best solutions that are consistent, useful, and highly stable. One can use Python to develop GUIs, web applications, websites, AI/ML applications, Big Data applications, and more.

Bonus Read: Node.js vs React.js

Python vs Node js: Developer’s take

When it comes to the developers, they are the ones who have worked with the technology and can share their views better than anyone. Developers’ reviews can be technically on-point and guide you through the core aspects, rather than only business logic or overall approach. OpenXcell has a team of experienced developers with knowledge of both Node.js and Python, and one such expert is ready to share his take on Node js vs Python. Here’s what our Senior Software Engineer (Full-stack), Dhiral Bhuptani, from OpenXcell , has to say,

Node.js and Python both are popular technologies for backend operations in web development. However, Node.js is only focused on the backend; whilst, Python is a general-purpose language suited for many fields and tasks. Node.js is fast, lightweight, and has full-stack JS development capabilities. On the other hand, Python has a simple structure and large AI and ML libraries. Both technologies have active development communities contributing to the projects.

To decide whether Node.js or Python fits your project best, you need to know which technologies you’d like to incorporate and define the basic functional requirements of the product.

NodeJS vs Python: Final Note

Now that everything has been discussed, there might be a vague idea in your mind about both Python and Node.js. Here, we were not trying to prove which one is better, we just laid the facts, and features of both Node.js and Python for your reference. Now, it’s up to you to decide which one is more closely suited for your project.

It can be tricky to select either one of Node.js and Python, but you should be clear about your project, end result, and which features you are going to incorporate into your project. The choice of Backend technology relies on all these and a plethora of other factors. So, if you still have any doubts, just share your requirements, and our professionals will assist you till the project is deployed.