Companies Using Python by Domain — Python Use Cases

According to the Tiobe Index, Python is the second most popular programming language. As of 2021, Python grew by 11.87% percent, and its exponential growth is still continuing to become the most used programming language in the upcoming years.

So what makes Python so special and why so many companies from different domains and backgrounds are considering it over other languages? Python is actually a versatile language that is powerful and easy to learn at the same time. The versatility factor comes from its range of frameworks and built-in libraries to serve different domains.

Also, the syntax is pretty simple and any beginner can easily cover the language basics in a single month. So, why exactly companies prefer to use Python for their backend and even frontend systems, let’s find out.

Python Use Cases

So which companies actually use Python and why they prefer this specific language over the others? We divided some of the biggest Tech companies by specific Sectors to analyze which companies are using Python and Why?

Cloud Platforms

Python is widely used in the development of Cloud Applications and it provides a range of environments and platforms such as iCloud that integrates Python with cloud services like AWS. The language helps to analyze data fast and it is also pretty good with organization, hence making it a better choice for cloud streaming analytics applications.

Dropbox

Dropbox is a cloud-based platform to store your graphics, content, and files. The company successfully scaled to over 200M users in just a few years. The secret sauce was the performance and reliability of their platform where collaboration while working on documents and files was made easy for everyone.

The Head of Server Engineering at Dropbox, Rajiv Eranki himself revealed that Dropbox excessively uses Python for almost everything on their platform. Another reason behind their enormous success is Guido van Rossum who worked with Dropbox to make its top-of-the-line Python Stack.

Dropbox also moved a few of the performance-critical elements to the Go language. The language is also well-known for its speed and performance and that’s why many companies use Go to ensure the topmost performance.

Why Dropbox use Python?

• According to a Senior Dropbox Engineer, they integrated Python for cross-platform support, readability, ease of learning.
• They hired the creator of Python to make Dropbox more performance-oriented by making Python Stack more reliable.

Events Processing

Event Processing and monitoring services also use a range of languages to build their infrastructure. Many of these companies use C++ or Java for a solid foundation while others consider Python as their go-to primary Language

Datadog

Datadog is a monitoring service used in cloud-based infrastructures to ensure the security of the system while monitoring the stacks and apps. It basically helps you monitor all our stacks from the bottom to the top-most layer without neglecting any 3rd-party services or databases.

The Datadog was initially coded in Python but they also incorporated other languages such as Go and Scala to control Data processing and streaming respectively. However, Python is still the fundamental language used in the Datadog infrastructure.

Why Datadog use Python?

• According to the DataDog CTO and Cofounder Alexis Lê-Quôc, they used Python for productivity and unmatched support for fast numerical processing of time series.
• For other performance-critical factors such as speed, they moved from Python to Go and Scala. However, the baseline still stays the same.

Social Media Platforms

Python is an excellent choice for large-scale applications such as Social Media platforms. Some of the largest tech companies make use of Python in their backend and frontend systems in one way or the other.

Instagram

Instagram utilizes Django web Framework to handle its powerful backend system. This framework is entirely coded in Python. According to the Instagram engineering team, they chose this Python’s framework due to the practicality and simplicity. They further described their philosophy that states, “do the simple thing first”.

Instagram currently has over 1 Billion users and in order to handle this user base efficiently, they utilized Python’s framework. Web services also often have a limited CPU time on each server. Using Python actually helped the Instagram backend to efficiently handle the resources for processing more users per second.

Why Instagram use Python?

• The Engineering Team at Instagram marks Efficiency as the main contributing factor to use Python because of being bottlenecked by CPU time on each server.
• They also profiled their Django server by developing the Dynostats tool to sample user requests for gathering performance and efficiency metrics.

Quora

We all know Quora as a platform where people ask questions or solutions to their problems. Do you know what was the throughout process behind the development of this platform and why they chose Python?

The Founder of Quora, Charlie Cheevers compared different languages such as Python, C#, Java, and Scala for the development of their own platform. The decision from the Quora development team came down to Python because of its efficiency and performance factors.

Why Quora use Python?

• Charlie Cheevers admitted that Python had some really good web frameworks such as Pylons and Django.
• Also, the communication of data between the browser and the server was pretty easy with Python because data structure mapping sets well with JavaScript.
• The code readability was another contributing factor and the Quora team needed this for their development team.

Reddit

Reddit had over 430 Million active users back in 2019. This number has significantly increased in these years. The platform was launched long ago in 2005 where the founders and developers decided to use LISP as their main language but soon they realized that Python is more suitable for such a platform with growing users.

Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian also gave the reasons for moving from LISP to Python. These reasons were straightforward and linked to the advantages of using Python. There are also thousands and thousands of Subreddits hosted on the platform that needs some solid foundation to provide smooth experience to the users.

Why Reddit use Python?

• The founders gave two reasons for shifting to Python at the early stages of Reddit, the first reason was the huge number of libraries that this language has to offer.
• The second reason was the readability and ease of coding which was absolutely needed by Reddit’s developer’s team. However, another big factor is the efficiency and reliability of Python.

eCommerce

The eCommerce industry thrived a lot especially in the year 2020 when the pandemic hit the globe. The eCommerce sales were expected to reach $4.13 trillion in 2020 because everyone preferred to shop online. Many Tech Giants have grown their revenue by 3 to 4x during this time and they handled all the traffic with their strong Python backend systems.

Amazon

Amazon is one of the largest eCommerce giants in the whole world with Billions of dollars in revenue. It is the biggest marketplace for retailers and buyers to shop their favorite items, hence millions of people visit Amazon on a daily basis to order their routine or other items.

The company officially uses languages like Java, C++, and Perl for their backend system but if we specifically talk about the trained algorithm of Java then the credit goes to Python. They used the Python learning engine by integrating it with the Hadoop database to make the platform more efficient.

Why Amazon use Python?

• The Big Data features of Python were pretty attractive for Amazon and that’s why they decided to use this language for better filtration of data to make Amazon search results more efficient and user-targeted.
• The language is also pretty scalable and portable and considering its integration with Hadoop and Apache, it was the best choice for this eCommerce platform.

Instacart

Instacart stepped into the delivery system market with the idea of grocery delivery. The company is said to have a valuation of around $2B. Also, the platform has over 500,000 active users with a revenue of $2M. They initially started from an iOS app and then they expanded to other platforms.

In a StackShare interview with the Co-founder of Instacart, Brandon Leonardo revealed that they actually use two systems for their platforms. One of these systems is in Ruby while the other one is in Python. They use libraries like NumPy and Pandas. The data science development team is actually working with Python and R for their production database.

Why Instacart use Python?

• At an initial stage, the developers at Instacart were weak at Ruby, and they worked on Python and R for dashboard and features development.
• The application infrastructure is in Ruby but the main reason for Instacart to use Python is its Data Science features.

Online Payment Systems

We use multiple online payment gateways to transfer payments in just seconds. Fintech startups only prefer those languages for their APIs and backend systems that are efficient enough to process their transactions.

Stripe

The Stripe payment gateway is used by companies and individuals to send and receive payments all across the world. They smoothly handle all the transactions happening over their system by controlling all the processes such as invoicing, managing subscriptions, and fraud prevention.

The FinTech company actually used Python to develop all its APIs for mobile applications and even web apps. Some big companies that use Stripe gateway include Salesforce, Lyft, and Amazon. Fintech companies prefer Python because of its data features.

Why Stripe use Python?

• Python is perfect for Big Data systems and that’s exactly what FinTech companies need in their environment to make millions of calculations and collect data.
• The financial experts also find Python easy to learn and use which made it a good choice for Stripe as well.

Online Booking Systems

Everybody uses booking systems to buy movie or plane tickets or even to book a cab. The following companies use Python for their efficient systems.

Uber

Uber is a global cab booking service with millions of users worldwide. According to Uber Engineering Team, the platform utilizes four languages including Python, Node.js, Go, and Java for their operations.

Python and Node.js are two of the most dominant languages used in the development of Uber to run multiple application services. They also use Go for the performance-critical factor because Go provides some concurrency features.

Why Uber use Python?

• Uber uses Python for the functioning of most of its main service processes running in the Uber application today.
• Python also helps Uber to access their developed visualization frameworks.

Lyft

As a popular Ridesharing company, Lyft also needs a solid infrastructure to handle all its services. Their platforms are actually built upon Python and Roy Williams at SF Python Meetup also discussed that they use NumPy, Pandas, and PuLP to serve requests via Flask, Gevent, and Gunicorn.

Their microservices were all coded in Python2 and they made a shift to Python3 by successfully migrating most of their services which made their platform even more efficient.

Why Lyft use Python?

• They use Python due to its range of libraries that fulfill all their requirements such as they use SciPy for the prevention of frauds.
• They also adopted MyPy as they shifted to Python3 which further contributed to the performance of their application.

Music and Video Streaming Systems

Our favorite entertainment and streaming applications also excessively use Python, following are the examples of some big companies.

Netflix

Netflix is probably one of the biggest movie streaming applications with millions of active users. Their developers had the authority to choose a suitable language that can potentially power data analysis server-side systems.

The Netflix Engineers discovered different languages and they made up their mind to use Python due to its abundance of libraries and rich community.

Why Netflix use Python?

• The availability of many libraries actually urged the Netflix engineers to use Python because they would be able to solve any problem with these libraries.
• For their Central Alert Gateway web app to process alerts, they saw Python as the most suitable option.

Spotify

Spotify is a popular music streaming app with over 155 Million paid subscribers. The Spotify Engineers team prefers Python for a variety of reasons and they use its numerous libraries for different services.

Spotify uses Data Analysis to improve its algorithm so that it can provide users with their desired results based on filtered data. Also, Python makes it easy to integrate with Hadoop.

Why Spotify use Python?

• Spotify uses the Luigi package for their Data Analysis and better decision-making to improve their product.
• The 80% of the total backend services of Spotify are purely written in Python

PropTech

The Real Estate market is revolutionizing with the addition of Technological startups and companies that aim to provide digital Real Estate solutions. Here are some PropTech companies utilizing Python for their systems.

Opendoor

Opendoor takes away your headache of buying and selling homes with lengthy processes that consume your life. The company used Ruby on Rails and Angular.js for the front-end of their application. They also used Bootstrap to enhance the design and add additional features.

They utilize Python for the machine learning part using various building blocks such as SqlAlchemy, scikit-learn, and Pandas.

Why Opendoor use Python?

• Opendoor utilizes Python for their backend machine learning system to train the algorithms using various types of relevant data.
• They use a range of Python libraries and building blocks such as Pandas and SqlAlchemy

Credit Card Payment Systems

Credit Card Payment companies in the FinTech industry have always been thriving. These companies also prefer to use Python for a better customer experience.

Revolut

Revolut is a popular money exchanger and credit card provider firm. They have over 15 million customers globally who have excess to Revolut’s marketplace for buying Crypto and Gold. Revolut also posted a job for a Python developer for their core development team.

The focus of Revolut was to use popular Python frameworks such as Django to develop an efficient system for better customer experiences by utilizing the data.

Why Revolut use Python?

• Revolut used Flask or Django for the backend development of the application, they hired new developers for this purpose.
• They also utilized SqlAlchemy for machine learning purposes using Python.

Affirm

Affirm is another credit card firm that issues cards to millions of their customers without any hidden fees. This company is also utilizing python for their mobile and web applications, they recently made a few changes to their Python codebase.

Unnecessary database reads were removed that included N+1 queries issues with SQLAlchemy. The further optimized the CPU-bound code making heavy use of Python’s cProfile.

Why Affirm use Python?

• They integrated Python to prevent any regressions by optimizing the CPU-bound code.
• They also used Gevent along with Python to scale up their architecture.

Peer-to-Peer Lending Systems

Peer-to-Peer lending is becoming more popular due to the low interest rates. Many companies have their P2P systems in place by making use of Python.

Zopa

Zopa makes loaning easier by bringing investors and borrowers to their platforms. The Zopa aims to provide a smooth and easy experience to lenders and borrowers using an interactive platform with Python as its backbone.

They also hired Python engineers and programmers for Big data architecture of their company. They use a cloud-based system to store all their data securely.

Why Zopa use Python?

• Zopa wanted to make use of their Big Data system to filter out some useful information that can help to make their platform much better.
• They also used PySpark to support their Apache Spark server which can easily be integrated with Python.

Stock Trading Platforms

Stock and Crypto trading has been hot during all these years. Many new trading platforms joined in with their solid infrastructures and some of them with Python architecture are listed below.

Robinhood

Robinhood is one of the biggest players in the Crypto and Stock trading market with millions of customers, especially from the U.S. This is an interactive trading platform with clean interfaces to make trading easier for everyone.

Jaren Glover also cleared in an interview with SoftwareDaily that they used Python for their market data services just like other trading platforms did. Also, they rewrote those services in GoLang for performance factors.

Why Robinhood use Python?

• They wrote some trading services in Python but then rewrote them in Go Lang by taking performance-critical factors in sight to ensure low latency.
• The most of the RobinHood APIs are either written in Python and GoLang.

Bank of America’s Quartz

Quartz is a system that provides integrated trading, risk management, position management, pricing, and pricing optimization by Bank of America Merrill Lynch. It is currently gaining exposure.

However, the platform mainly depends on Python which further connects to other utilized languages such as C++ and Java to make all these bank services.

Why BoA Quartz use Python?

• The platforms uses a lot of Python codes and scripts but other languages such as C++ and Java are also used under the hood for things like pricing, trading, order books, risk systems, market data, and connectivity
• Also, Quartz uses an object database which is far more efficient than any conventional database and it is also integrated with Python in some way.

J.P. Morgan’s Athena

This cross-asset technology by J.P. Morgan aims to provide a range of applications that include sales, trading, operations, risk, and research.

The J.P. Morgan’s Athena also excessively used Python for their system with over 35 Million lines of code. Python’s flexibility made things even easier for Athena to scale the platform in the last 10 years.

Why Athena use Python?

• The whole architecture of these trading and risk analytics platforms is built upon Python with millions of lines of code.
• They use Python for Data Science and Machine Learning with over 150,000 modules and many packages.

CRM

Every medium to large-scale company needs a Customer Relation Management system to keep track of their customers while looking at the insights for making better decisions. These CRMs make the best use of Python to provide a solid solution to companies.

SalesForce

SalesForce offers a range of products for customer management and data insights. The platform and its applications actually use a language with Java-like syntax. However, they also use their own language in their system called Apex.

Apex and JavaScript are used side-by-side in their systems for developing scalable applications in a strongly typed language. Python is also used in the performance-critical areas of SalesForce applications.

Why SalesForce use Python?

• The majority of the coding in the SalesForce application is done with Java, C++, or Apex while performance factors are covered with Python.
• The simple salesforce library was created by someone on Github which is basically a REST API client built for newer Python releases.

Active Campaign

Active Campaign is a one-stop solution for all marketing solutions, email marketing, and CRM tools to engage more clients. The company was previously using PHP as its core platform language. PHP was good to some extent informing the company’s backbone but it was certainly not enough.

As for scripting, the Active Campaign moved to Python while for compiling processes they opted for a more solid language like Java.

Why Active Campaign use Python?

• The simplicity and reputation of Python made Active Campaign engineers lean towards this fastly growing language.
• Python’s Flask framework caught the attention of Active Campaign engineers and they started working on it.

Enterprise Applications

Enterprise Applications are pretty vague but they all are used for better customer relations and productivity in the company. Following are a few Python-based enterprise applications.

Odoo

Odoo is an ERP and CRM system utilized for the tracking and management of materials, human resources, finances, accounting aspects, and sales. This open-source platform is built upon Python and it shows some really useful data to the users.

A range of Python packages is used in Odoo including Python-psycopg2, Python-dateutil, Python-simplejson, etc.

Why Odoo use Python?

• Odoo is an open-source CRM and ERP system with over 7 million users.
• Odoo utilizes many Python packages for improved functionalities and features.

Made.com

Made is a competitor of the Odoo ERP system and it depicts the use of Python in a classic enterprise setting. The Java and C++ architectural lessons were applied to Made to bring the best out of its services.

Why Made use Python?

• The company uses Python because of rapid prototyping, produce terse, reliability, and easy code maintenance.
• The Made supported their online retail business with the help of their Python-based logistics software.

Rackspace

Rackspace targets the VMWare services by providing better infrastructure using a range of Cloud, Application, Data, and Security solutions. Rackspace currently uses CORE and Python for providing a better customer experience.

The Rackspace also first relied upon PHP with a few hundred customer base servers. These PHP pages and modules were not much scalable, hence a better alternative was needed. At last, the team decided to let go of PHP and start using Python with their CORE.

Why Rackspace use Python?

• With Python, Rackspace achieved its goal of Core Objects Reused Everywhere by implementing API and business logic for special applications.
• They used an approach to convert server-side template pages into Python servlets that with output sent into the PHP server.

Why are companies using Python?

Python - What’s Next?

There is no doubt that Python is the soaring language of the modern age with its applications spread across all different domains such as Game Development, Application Development, Web Development, Machine Learning, Data Science and the list goes on.

The libraries and frameworks further open the door of opportunities for developers to achieve any desired result by exploring the best environments and libraries. Python is progressing extremely fast in AI and ML domains where the opportunities seem endless. The language has a good trendline and many people are actually learning it which makes it a worthy choice overall.

Why Should you Migrate to Python?

The foremost reason is the ease of learning and then its usage and readability factors just make it unmatchable in front of other traditional languages. Python has all the libraries and frameworks to code almost anything you want with the right knowledge.

The diversified nature of this language makes it very special as it has so many use cases. Still, Python has some performance issues as it’s relatively slower than some other languages.