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. Microframeworks
  4. Microframeworks
  5. Falcon vs Rails API

Falcon vs Rails API

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Falcon
Falcon
Stacks84
Followers201
Votes89
Rails API
Rails API
Stacks95
Followers142
Votes16
GitHub Stars5.1K
Forks275

Falcon vs Rails API: What are the differences?

Developers describe Falcon as "High-performance Python framework for building cloud APIs and web app backends". Falcon is a minimalist WSGI library for building speedy web APIs and app backends. We like to think of Falcon as the Dieter Rams of web frameworks. On the other hand, Rails API is detailed as "Rails for API only applications". Rails::API is a subset of a normal Rails application, created for applications that don't require all functionality that a complete Rails application provides. It is a bit more lightweight, and consequently a bit faster than a normal Rails application. The main example for its usage is in API applications only, where you usually don't need the entire Rails middleware stack nor template generation.

Falcon and Rails API can be primarily classified as "Microframeworks (Backend)" tools.

"Python" is the top reason why over 7 developers like Falcon, while over 4 developers mention "Great for quick decoupled apps" as the leading cause for choosing Rails API.

Falcon and Rails API are both open source tools. Falcon with 6.8K GitHub stars and 707 forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Rails API with 5.26K GitHub stars and 293 GitHub forks.

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

Detailed Comparison

Falcon
Falcon
Rails API
Rails API

Falcon is a minimalist WSGI library for building speedy web APIs and app backends. We like to think of Falcon as the Dieter Rams of web frameworks.

Rails::API is a subset of a normal Rails application, created for applications that don't require all functionality that a complete Rails application provides. It is a bit more lightweight, and consequently a bit faster than a normal Rails application. The main example for its usage is in API applications only, where you usually don't need the entire Rails middleware stack nor template generation.

Intuitive routing via URI templates and resource classes;Easy access to headers and bodies through request and response classes;Idiomatic HTTP error responses via a handy exception base class;DRY request processing using global, resource, and method hooks;Snappy unit testing through WSGI helpers and mocks;20% speed boost when Cython is available;Python 2.6, Python 2.7, PyPy and Python 3.3/3.4 support
-
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
5.1K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
275
Stacks
84
Stacks
95
Followers
201
Followers
142
Votes
89
Votes
16
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 13
    Python
  • 11
    FAST
  • 10
    Minimal
  • 8
    Open source
  • 8
    Well designed
Pros
  • 5
    Lightweight
  • 5
    Great for quick decoupled apps
  • 3
    Simply the best
  • 2
    Soon to be merged into core Rails 5
  • 1
    Logging by default
Integrations
Python
Python
Ruby
Ruby

What are some alternatives to Falcon, Rails API?

ExpressJS

ExpressJS

Express is a minimal and flexible node.js web application framework, providing a robust set of features for building single and multi-page, and hybrid web applications.

Django REST framework

Django REST framework

It is a powerful and flexible toolkit that makes it easy to build Web APIs.

Sails.js

Sails.js

Sails is designed to mimic the MVC pattern of frameworks like Ruby on Rails, but with support for the requirements of modern apps: data-driven APIs with scalable, service-oriented architecture.

Sinatra

Sinatra

Sinatra is a DSL for quickly creating web applications in Ruby with minimal effort.

Lumen

Lumen

Laravel Lumen is a stunningly fast PHP micro-framework for building web applications with expressive, elegant syntax. We believe development must be an enjoyable, creative experience to be truly fulfilling. Lumen attempts to take the pain out of development by easing common tasks used in the majority of web projects, such as routing, database abstraction, queueing, and caching.

Slim

Slim

Slim is easy to use for both beginners and professionals. Slim favors cleanliness over terseness and common cases over edge cases. Its interface is simple, intuitive, and extensively documented — both online and in the code itself.

Fastify

Fastify

Fastify is a web framework highly focused on speed and low overhead. It is inspired from Hapi and Express and as far as we know, it is one of the fastest web frameworks in town. Use Fastify can increase your throughput up to 100%.

hapi

hapi

hapi is a simple to use configuration-centric framework with built-in support for input validation, caching, authentication, and other essential facilities for building web applications and services.

TypeORM

TypeORM

It supports both Active Record and Data Mapper patterns, unlike all other JavaScript ORMs currently in existence, which means you can write high quality, loosely coupled, scalable, maintainable applications the most productive way.

FeathersJS

FeathersJS

Feathers is a real-time, micro-service web framework for NodeJS that gives you control over your data via RESTful resources, sockets and flexible plug-ins.

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