The State of Django 2026: Boring is so back

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Welcome to the highlights from the fifth annual Django Developers Survey, a collaboration between the Django Software Foundation and PyCharm. This year’s report draws on responses from nearly 3,500 Django developers across more than 40 countries — from students in their first year to veterans with decades of experience.

In software, “boring” is a compliment. It means a technology works so reliably you can stop thinking about it. By that standard, Django in 2026 is thriving: PostgreSQL has been the database of choice for 76–79% of respondents for five consecutive years, Django’s template engine has held steady at around 80%, and nearly half of developers upgrade with every stable release — 43% are already on Django 6.0, months after it shipped. The core is boring in the best possible way. Mature, but not static.

Everything around that core, though, is moving fast. AI is now an everyday tool for most developers, and agents are beginning to move beyond answering questions to editing files, running commands, and completing larger tasks. Newer tools are consolidating workflows that once required several separate utilities, typing is becoming standard practice, and the boundaries between editors, terminals, automation, and AI are getting blurrier.

That may be Django’s particular advantage in 2026: it is mature enough to be dependable, active enough to keep moving, and stable enough to give developers room to change almost everything else.

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1. AI is mainstream, but no workflow has won

AI has become part of the normal Django development workflow. Only 10% of respondents said they regularly use no AI tools for coding, while 58% of AI users use them every day and another 27% several times a week.

What remains unsettled is how developers use them. The interfaces are split almost evenly across the browser, the IDE, and the command line, and no tool dominates: Claude Code leads at 35%, with ChatGPT just behind at 33% and GitHub Copilot at 23%. And for all the attention on agents, a majority of AI users — 56% — still use it purely for chat and advice.

2. Dominating AI workflow is still supervised

Nearly half of AI users already work with AI through an IDE integration. But despite the growth of coding agents, the dominant workflow is still supervised: 59% have AI generate code and then apply the changes themselves, 44% let it edit files or run commands when instructed, and only 27% use it to autonomously complete multi-step tasks.

The emerging pattern is therefore less “replace the IDE with an agent” and more “bring the agent into the development environment.” Developers are adopting AI quickly, but the editor remains their home base for understanding the codebase, reviewing changes, and deciding what makes it into the project.

Nowhere is the shift clearer than in how developers learn. Django’s official documentation remains the top resource at 67%, but AI tools are now second at 51% — ahead of YouTube, reading source code, and Stack Overflow.

AI is already routine for writing code, debugging, research, and learning. But developers are still experimenting with where it belongs: in the browser, inside the IDE, at the terminal, or increasingly, acting directly on the codebase.

AI is changing the IDE faster than it is replacing it.

3. Python tooling is consolidating fast

Two tools that barely existed a few years ago are already near the top of the survey.

uv, released in February 2024, is already used by 43% of respondents for managing Python environments—second only to venv at 63% and ahead of Docker at 31%.

Ruff tells a similar story. At 43%, it is now the most widely used code-quality and formatting tool in the survey, ahead of IDE inspections at 27%, Black at 25%, pre-commit at 20%, and Flake8 at 17%.

The shift is not that Python’s older tools have disappeared. It is that newer tools increasingly cover jobs that once required several separate utilities. The result is a Python toolchain beginning to consolidate around fewer, faster, more capable tools.

4. Type hints are winning. The type checker race is wide open.

Type hints are becoming the norm in Django development: 57% already use them, and another 26% plan to. What is much less settled is how developers check those types.

Among developers who use type hints, the most popular option isn’t a standalone type checker at all: 40% rely on the checker built into their IDE. Mypy follows at 32%, Ruff at 29%, and Pyright/Pylance at 22%. Newer entrants are already appearing too, with Astral’s ty reaching 12% and Meta’s Pyrefly at 4%.

The practice, in other words, is converging faster than the tooling. Django developers increasingly agree that types are useful, but there is still no consensus on which tool should enforce them—or whether a separate tool is necessary at all.

That makes type checking an interesting space to watch in 2027: will one of the newer standalone tools break away from the pack, or will type checking increasingly become something developers simply expect their IDE to provide?

5. As AI writes more code, verification matters more

AI is moving beyond suggestions and into the codebase. That makes automated verification more important, not less.

The survey can’t tell us whether AI is driving greater adoption of tests or CI. What it does show is that most Django developers already have the infrastructure agents need: pytest is used by 45% of respondents and unittest by 43%, with pytest-django at 34%.

That testing culture sits alongside widespread CI/CD adoption — GitHub Actions is now used by a majority of respondents at 51%, with GitLab CI/CD at another 26%. Together, these create a natural feedback loop for agentic development: an agent can make a change, run the test suite, respond to failures, and hand the developer a result that has already passed the project’s checks.

Not everyone has that loop in place: 19% of respondents write no automated tests at all. As more code is delegated to agents, that fifth of developers is working without the safety net that makes delegation trustworthy.

The emerging agentic workflow may depend as much on verification as generation. The more code we delegate, the more valuable it becomes to have tests and pipelines that can quickly tell both developers and agents whether a change actually works.

Agents can generate code. Tests and pipelines tell them whether it works.

6. One framework, two ways to build

Two distinct ways of building with Django are now firmly mainstream: letting Django render the interface, or using it as the backend for a separate frontend. 72% of respondents use server-rendered templates, while 53% use Django for API-only applications and 46% use it as the backend for a single-page application or dedicated JavaScript frontend.

The balance is even clearer when developers are asked for their primary approach. Half primarily build server-rendered applications, while 44% primarily use Django for either APIs or dedicated JavaScript frontends.

The JavaScript numbers tell the sharper story. React has barely moved in five years — 37% in 2021, 38% today. What’s changed is everything around it: jQuery has fallen from 37% to 23%, Vue from 28% to 17%, while htmx has climbed from just 5% to 34%. htmx isn’t taking share from React — it’s modernizing the server-rendered side of the divide that jQuery used to own.

That flexibility is one of Django’s strengths. The same framework can sit at the center of a hypermedia application or behind an API consumed by React, mobile apps, or other clients.

Django remains unusually comfortable on both sides of the frontend divide.

Conclusion

Across the survey, the pattern is consistent: developers are changing their tools and workflows far faster than they are changing the framework underneath them. The parts of Django they value most remain familiar — models, the admin, authentication — and even deployment stays defiantly unfashionable, with 54% shipping monoliths and 44% self-hosting.

Even where Django itself is evolving, it does so deliberately: 33% of respondents use its async features and another 40% plan to — change offered as an opt-in, not a rewrite.

That stability is increasingly valuable. Developers can experiment with a new agent, replace several tools with Ruff or uv, add htmx to a template, or adopt a new type checker without having to rethink the framework underneath their application.

Django’s advantage in 2026 is not that it is the newest thing. It is that it gives developers a solid, dependable — yes, boring — place from which to try the newest things. Boring is so back.

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Explore the complete 2026 Django Developers Survey Results.