Why Choose Sanic: An Asynchronous Python Web Framework for Production

Python developers often start with Flask, Django, or Tornado, but the rise of asynchronous programming in Python 3.5+ (async/await) has shifted focus toward high‑performance async web frameworks.

A community benchmark comparing 226 web frameworks across multiple languages shows many traditional Python frameworks (Flask, Django, Tornado) near the bottom of the speed rankings, while newer async frameworks perform significantly better.

Below is the benchmark source code used for the comparison:

<code># Disable all logging features
import logging
logging.disable()

from flask import Flask
from meinheld import patch
patch.patch_all()
app = Flask(__name__)

@app.route("/")
def index():
    return ""

@app.route("/user/<int:id>", methods=["GET"])
def user_info(id):
    return str(id)

@app.route("/user", methods=["POST"])
def user():
    return ""

from django.http import HttpResponse
from django.views.decorators.csrf import csrf_exempt

def index(request):
    return HttpResponse(status=200)

def get_user(request, id):
    return HttpResponse(id)

@csrf_exempt
def create_user(request):
    return HttpResponse(status=200)

import tornado.httpserver, tornado.ioloop, tornado.web

class MainHandler(tornado.web.RequestHandler):
    def get(self):
        pass

class UserHandler(tornado.web.RequestHandler):
    def post(self):
        pass

class UserInfoHandler(tornado.web.RequestHandler):
    def get(self, id):
        self.write(id)

app = tornado.web.Application([
    (r"/", MainHandler),
    (r"/user", UserHandler),
    (r"/user/(\d+)", UserInfoHandler),
])

import multiprocessing
from sanic import Sanic
from sanic.response import text
app = Sanic("benchmark")

@app.route("/")
async def index(request):
    return text("")

@app.route("/user/<id:int>", methods=["GET"])
async def user_info(request, id):
    return text(str(id))

@app.route("/user", methods=["POST"])
async def user(request):
    return text("")

if __name__ == "__main__":
    workers = multiprocessing.cpu_count()
    app.run(host="0.0.0.0", port=3000, workers=workers, debug=False, access_log=False)
</code>

The benchmark intentionally performs minimal work—simply returning a response—to place all frameworks on an equal footing.

The article then introduces Sanic as the featured async framework, arguing that blocking I/O is the main enemy in web development and that async frameworks like Sanic eliminate such bottlenecks.

Sanic’s ecosystem has grown over five years, offering a wide range of third‑party extensions for authentication, monitoring, ORM, caching, and more, making it both fast and feature‑rich.

Production readiness is demonstrated by the author’s experience using Sanic in real‑world services since 2019, noting that Sanic was designed from the start to be deployable in production without relying on external servers such as gunicorn.

Documentation quality is highlighted: Sanic provides comprehensive Chinese guides and API references, with ongoing translations into other languages, contrasting with the fragmented documentation of some other frameworks.

Community support is strong, with official forums, Discord, GitHub issues, Twitter, and Stack Overflow channels where developers can interact directly with core contributors.

Overall, the article advocates for choosing Sanic when you need a fast, production‑grade, well‑documented asynchronous Python web framework.