[Django]-Comparison between django-admin-tools and django-grappelli

If I had to summarize: DAT is more about functionality; Grappelli is a more about style. So whatever fits you, best, go with it. Being a design-driven company, we ended up going with Grappelli.

My company did this analysis when we decided to use Django admin as a client-facing backend for a CMS Product. DAT offers some interesting functionality, some of which is duplicated in grappelli and some of which is not. Grappelli offers a few interesting additions of its own. In the end, we went with grappelli because of the really nice styling. My recommendation is to try both. Early on, we included both in the project, set up their respective dashboards, and it took about 30 seconds to switch between the two.

The commenter is right about grappelli needing to be in sync with django. I made the mistake of upgrading django without checking with grappelli, and it broke several things. The latest version of grappelli supports Django 1.4 and we’ll be upgrading them together.

You will need to keep Django and grappelli in sync… The current version of Django is 1.4, but the current version grappelli supports 1.3. There is a branch that supports 1.4 however. If you are willing to support the minor hassle of managing this, grappelli offers some nice enhancements and a slicker look – starting with being able to set the title to the admin interface without copying and editing the admin template.

Depending on what you are doing, nice DateTime pickers (with “Today” and “Now” buttons) as well as sortable inlines can be very convenient.

Here is a little more up to date answer:

I have been using both but now am slowly moving towards grapelli, especially for new projects. Grapelli has for the most part caught up with django admin tools in terms of creating custom dashboards and menus. I still haven’t seen all the features like draggable panels. Grapelli has better support and this can be seen by the repository activity. It was first to support Django 1.7 and at the time of me writing this, DAT did not offer that support yet. The reported bugs also do not get patched very often. I am also liking the way Grapelli looks and it is used in Mezzanine, my favourite cms.

Here are the two repositories if you wish to look:

• https://bitbucket.org/izi/django-admin-tools/overview
• https://github.com/sehmaschine/django-grappelli

Hope this helps.