StackShareStackShare
Follow on
StackShare

Discover and share technology stacks from companies around the world.

Follow on

© 2025 StackShare. All rights reserved.

Product

  • Stacks
  • Tools
  • Feed

Company

  • About
  • Contact

Legal

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Languages
  4. Languages
  5. Buffalo vs Go

Buffalo vs Go

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Golang
Golang
Stacks24.0K
Followers13.9K
Votes3.3K
GitHub Stars130.7K
Forks18.4K
Buffalo
Buffalo
Stacks13
Followers50
Votes5
GitHub Stars8.3K
Forks585

Buffalo vs Go: What are the differences?

# Introduction
Buffalo and Go are two frameworks used for web development, but they have key differences that set them apart. 

1. **File Structure**: In Buffalo, the file structure is opinionated and follows the MVC (Model-View-Controller) pattern, making it easier for developers to organize their code. On the other hand, Go leaves the file structure open to the developer's interpretation, providing more flexibility but requiring more effort to set up a structured codebase.
   
2. **Code Generation**: Buffalo comes with a powerful code generation tool, pop, which automates the creation of models, migrations, and other resources. Go does not offer such a tool, meaning developers using Go have to write more code manually.
   
3. **Database Integration**: Buffalo has built-in support for the pop ORM (Object-Relational Mapping) library, making it easy to work with databases in an object-oriented way. In contrast, Go does not have a specific ORM library integrated, requiring developers to choose and integrate third-party libraries for database interaction.
   
4. **Front-end Development**: Buffalo includes Webpack and Yarn to manage front-end assets and dependencies, making it easier to build and bundle front-end code. Go, being a programming language, does not focus on front-end development tools and requires developers to set up their own toolchain for managing front-end assets.
   
5. **Authentication and Authorization**: Buffalo provides built-in authentication and authorization tools, such as the ability to integrate with OAuth providers easily. In Go, developers have to implement authentication and authorization from scratch or integrate third-party packages, adding more complexity to the development process.

6. **Error Handling**: Buffalo provides a robust error handling mechanism, including built-in support for handling different types of errors and responding appropriately. Go, while offering error handling capabilities, requires developers to implement error handling logic manually, leading to potential inconsistencies in error responses. 

In Summary, Buffalo offers a more opinionated and structured approach to web development with built-in tools for code generation, database integration, front-end development, and error handling, while Go provides greater flexibility but requires developers to set up these tools and components themselves. 

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs
CLI (Node.js)
or
Manual

Advice on Golang, Buffalo

Ido
Ido

Mar 6, 2020

Decided

When developing a new blockchain, we as a team chose Go lang over Java and other candidates, due to Go being (a) natively suited to concurrency - there are primitives in the language itself (goroutines, channels) that really help with reasoning about concurrency (b) super fast - build time, running, testing are all much faster that Java, this gives a far superior developer experience (c) shorter and stricter than Java - code is much shorter (less verbose), and there is usually one good way to do things, and even the code formatter that is bundled with Go is very opinionated - over a short time this makes reading other people's code far smoother than having to deal with different styles.

You should be aware that Go presently (v1.13) lacks Generics.

267k views267k
Comments
Ítalo
Ítalo

VP Platform Engineering at Lykon

Feb 19, 2020

Decided

We decided to use python to write our ETLs and import them into metabase via a lambda. Before python we tried using Go, but overall go was way more verbose than Python when writing the ETLs. Go also had some issues managing memory when using the S3 upload manager library. This was a deal breaker for us that made us switch to Python.

In the end the solution was much cleaner and maintainable.

261k views261k
Comments
Mohamed
Mohamed

Software Engineer at YottaHQ Inc.

Dec 2, 2019

Decided

PHP is easy to learn and you can get up and running in no time, available on almost all hosting providers and you can find developers easily. It has some great frameworks for building your backend like Symfony and Laravel. However, it can be challenging when running an enterprise and needs some adjustments, very recommended for starting a new project or startup.

208k views208k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Golang
Golang
Buffalo
Buffalo

Go is expressive, concise, clean, and efficient. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel type system enables flexible and modular program construction. Go compiles quickly to machine code yet has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. It's a fast, statically typed, compiled language that feels like a dynamically typed, interpreted language.

Buffalo is Go web framework. Yeah, I hate the word "framework" too! Buffalo is different though. Buffalo doesn't want to re-invent wheels like routing and templating. Buffalo is glue that wraps all of the best packages available and makes them all play nicely together.

Statistics
GitHub Stars
130.7K
GitHub Stars
8.3K
GitHub Forks
18.4K
GitHub Forks
585
Stacks
24.0K
Stacks
13
Followers
13.9K
Followers
50
Votes
3.3K
Votes
5
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 557
    High-performance
  • 398
    Simple, minimal syntax
  • 365
    Fun to write
  • 305
    Easy concurrency support via goroutines
  • 273
    Fast compilation times
Cons
  • 43
    You waste time in plumbing code catching errors
  • 25
    Verbose
  • 23
    Packages and their path dependencies are braindead
  • 16
    Google's documentations aren't beginer friendly
  • 15
    Dependency management when working on multiple projects
Pros
  • 4
    Go
  • 1
    Friendly Api
Integrations
Revel
Revel
Martini
Martini
No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Golang, Buffalo?

Node.js

Node.js

Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices.

JavaScript

JavaScript

JavaScript is most known as the scripting language for Web pages, but used in many non-browser environments as well such as node.js or Apache CouchDB. It is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm scripting language that is dynamic,and supports object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles.

Python

Python

Python is a general purpose programming language created by Guido Van Rossum. Python is most praised for its elegant syntax and readable code, if you are just beginning your programming career python suits you best.

Rails

Rails

Rails is a web-application framework that includes everything needed to create database-backed web applications according to the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern.

PHP

PHP

Fast, flexible and pragmatic, PHP powers everything from your blog to the most popular websites in the world.

Django

Django

Django is a high-level Python Web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design.

Ruby

Ruby

Ruby is a language of careful balance. Its creator, Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, blended parts of his favorite languages (Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, and Lisp) to form a new language that balanced functional programming with imperative programming.

Laravel

Laravel

It is a web application framework with expressive, elegant syntax. It attempts to take the pain out of development by easing common tasks used in the majority of web projects, such as authentication, routing, sessions, and caching.

Java

Java

Java is a programming language and computing platform first released by Sun Microsystems in 1995. There are lots of applications and websites that will not work unless you have Java installed, and more are created every day. Java is fast, secure, and reliable. From laptops to datacenters, game consoles to scientific supercomputers, cell phones to the Internet, Java is everywhere!

HTML5

HTML5

HTML5 is a core technology markup language of the Internet used for structuring and presenting content for the World Wide Web. As of October 2014 this is the final and complete fifth revision of the HTML standard of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The previous version, HTML 4, was standardised in 1997.

Related Comparisons

Bootstrap
Materialize

Bootstrap vs Materialize

Laravel
Django

Django vs Laravel vs Node.js

Bootstrap
Foundation

Bootstrap vs Foundation vs Material UI

Node.js
Spring Boot

Node.js vs Spring-Boot

Liquibase
Flyway

Flyway vs Liquibase