Gunicorn vs. Mako Server vs. Python vs. Tornado Web Server Comparison Chart

The Mako Server is a compact, event-driven web and application server designed for resource-constrained systems. Engineered for embedded environments, it combines a lightweight HTTP/HTTPS server with a Lua scripting engine, enabling high-level development with direct access to low-level C code. Its architecture delivers high performance, low memory use, and secure integration, making it ideal for systems that can’t support heavier frameworks but require dynamic web interfaces or APIs. The server supports live updates, built-in debugging, and Lua Server Pages (LSP), offering PHP-like scripting optimized for embedded use. Common use cases include device portals, diagnostic dashboards, REST APIs, and real-time WebSocket interfaces. Lua’s speed and small footprint align perfectly with the Mako Server’s goals. More than just a web server, Mako is a comprehensive framework that enables developers to integrate modern, secure, web-enabled features into compact devices.

Tornado is a Python web framework and asynchronous networking library, originally developed at FriendFeed. By using non-blocking network I/O, Tornado can scale to tens of thousands of open connections, making it ideal for long polling, WebSockets, and other applications that require a long-lived connection to each user. Tornado is different from most Python web frameworks. It is not based on WSGI, and it is typically run with only one thread per process. While some support of WSGI is available in the tornado.wsgi module, it is not a focus of development and most applications should be written to use Tornado’s own interfaces (such as tornado.web) directly instead of using WSGI. In general, Tornado code is not thread-safe. Tornado is integrated with the standard library asyncio module and shares the same event loop (by default since Tornado 5.0). In general, libraries designed for use with asyncio can be mixed freely with Tornado.