msgspec VS marshmallow

Compare msgspec vs marshmallow and see what are their differences.

msgspec

A fast serialization and validation library, with builtin support for JSON, MessagePack, YAML, and TOML (by jcrist)

marshmallow

A lightweight library for converting complex objects to and from simple Python datatypes. (by marshmallow-code)
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msgspec marshmallow
31 11
1,868 6,893
- 0.9%
8.6 8.7
28 days ago 4 days ago
Python Python
BSD 3-clause "New" or "Revised" License MIT License
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

msgspec

Posts with mentions or reviews of msgspec. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-11-01.
  • Htmx, Rust and Shuttle: A New Rapid Prototyping Stack
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 1 Nov 2023
  • Litestar 2.0
    4 projects | /r/Python | 29 Aug 2023
    Full support for validation and serialisation of attrs classes and msgspec Structs. Where previously only Pydantic models and types where supported, you can now mix and match any of these three libraries. In addition to this, adding support for another modelling library has been greatly simplified with the new plugin architecture
  • FastAPI 0.100.0:Release Notes
    12 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 7 Jul 2023
    > Maybe it was very slow before

    That is at least partly the case. I maintain msgspec[1], another Python JSON validation library. Pydantic V1 was ~100x slower at encoding/decoding/validating JSON than msgspec, which was more a testament to Pydantic's performance issues than msgspec's speed. Pydantic V2 is definitely faster than V1, but it's still ~10x slower than msgspec, and up to 2x slower than other pure-python implementations like mashumaro.

    Recent benchmark here: https://gist.github.com/jcrist/d62f450594164d284fbea957fd48b...

    [1]: https://github.com/jcrist/msgspec

  • Pydantic 2.0
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 30 Jun 2023
    While it's definitely much faster than pydantic V1 (which is a huge accomplishment!), it's still not exactly what I'd call "fast".

    I maintain msgspec (https://github.com/jcrist/msgspec), a serialization/validation library which provides similar functionality to pydantic. Recent benchmarks of pydantic V2 against msgspec show msgspec is still 15-30x faster at JSON encoding, and 6-15x faster at JSON decoding/validating.

    Benchmark (and conversation with Samuel) here: https://gist.github.com/jcrist/d62f450594164d284fbea957fd48b...

    This is not to diminish the work of the pydantic team! For many users pydantic will be more than fast enough, and is definitely a more feature-filled tool. It's a good library, and people will be happy using it! But pydantic is not the only tool in this space, and rubbing some rust on it doesn't necessarily make it "fast".

  • Need help developing a high performance Redis ORM for Python
    2 projects | /r/Python | 23 May 2023
    https://github.com/jcrist/msgspec so I am using this instead of Pydantic.
  • Blog post: Writing Python like it’s Rust
    2 projects | /r/Python | 20 May 2023
    Another thing: why pyserde rather than stuff like msgspec? https://github.com/jcrist/msgspec
  • Show HN: Msgspec, a fast serialization/validation library for Python
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 11 May 2023
  • [Guide] A Tour Through the Python Framework Galaxy: Discovering the Stars
    14 projects | /r/coder_corner | 29 Apr 2023
    Try msgspec | Maat | turbo for fast serialization and validation
  • Pydantic V2 rewritten in Rust is 5-50x faster than Pydantic V1
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 8 Apr 2023
    Congratulations to the team, Pydantic is an amazing library.

    If you find JSON serialization/deserialization a bottleneck, another interesting library (with much less features) for Python is msgspec: https://github.com/jcrist/msgspec

  • Starlite updates March '22 | 2.0 is coming
    14 projects | /r/Python | 26 Mar 2023
    This feature is yet to be released, but it will allow you to seamlessly use data modelled with for example Pydantic, SQLAlchemy, msgspec or dataclasses in your route handlers, without the need for an intermediary model; The conversion will be handled by the specific DTO "backend" implementation. This new paradigm also makes it trivial to add support for any such modelling library, by simply implementing an appropriate backend.

marshmallow

Posts with mentions or reviews of marshmallow. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2022-10-25.
  • Help making draggable items for Flask app.
    1 project | /r/flask | 21 Aug 2023
    Somehow get a serializer going for your database models. I used marshmallow and flask-marshmallow
  • Faster time-to-market with API-first
    12 projects | dev.to | 25 Oct 2022
    Uses a robust data validation library: validating payloads is a complex business. Your data validation library must handle optional and required properties, string formats like ISO dates and UUIDs (both dates and UUIDs are string types in OpenAPI), and strict vs loose type validation (should a string pass as an integer if it can be casted?). Also, in the case of Python, you need to make sure 1 and 0 don’t pass for True and False when it comes to boolean properties. In my experience, the best data validation libraries in the Python ecosystem are pydantic and marshmallow. From the above-mentioned libraries, flasgger and flask-smorest work with marshmallow.
  • What's best library for swagger + flask?
    6 projects | /r/Python | 25 Sep 2022
    I also came across things like Marsmallow and Blueprints, but don't know what these are, still reading about this as I write.
  • pydantic VS marshmallow - a user suggested alternative
    2 projects | 21 Sep 2022
    Pydantic is a data validation library, marshmallow is a data validation library. None of the other libraries in the list of pydantic alternatives is a data validation library.
  • Yet another object serialization framework!
    2 projects | /r/Python | 5 Sep 2022
    I have been working on a package that is very similar in concept to marshmallow (https://marshmallow.readthedocs.io), but which adds a versioning mechanism to track changes in object structure across time, allowing you to migrate objects between different versions.
  • How to implement conditional model
    1 project | /r/flask | 6 Jul 2022
    Either using meta programming: https://github.com/marshmallow-code/marshmallow/issues/585
  • Should I use SQLAlchemy for a side project?
    2 projects | /r/Python | 15 Jun 2022
    You might be surprised how much I agree - I recently opened an issue there hoping to discuss something like this (still awaiting response). https://github.com/marshmallow-code/marshmallow/issues/2000
  • The Pocket Guide To API Request Validation You Wish You Had Earlier
    2 projects | dev.to | 6 Jan 2022
    Marshmallow
  • Project Althaia - looking for performance/accuracy feedback on my shallow fork of marshmallow
    2 projects | /r/Python | 3 Jan 2022
    I created a shallow fork of everyone's favourite marshmallow, to work around some performance issues while dumping data. The performance gain I measured is around 45%, but since it's a bad idea to rely on one's own testing, I was hoping that there are some folks here who use marshmallow in their projects, and who would be willing to try it out. Doubly so if your project has some unit tests in it, to confirm that nothing is broken due to my patches.
  • What's the fastest way to parse JSON to output?
    1 project | /r/flask | 21 Feb 2021
    I was looking at https://github.com/marshmallow-code/marshmallow That's a nice library to use to parsing?

What are some alternatives?

When comparing msgspec and marshmallow you can also consider the following projects:

pydantic - Data validation using Python type hints

Fast JSON schema for Python - Fast JSON schema validator for Python.

orjson - Fast, correct Python JSON library supporting dataclasses, datetimes, and numpy

cattrs - Composable custom class converters for attrs.

fastapi - FastAPI framework, high performance, easy to learn, fast to code, ready for production

serpy - ridiculously fast object serialization

mashumaro - Fast and well tested serialization library

WTForms - A flexible forms validation and rendering library for Python.

MessagePack - MessagePack serializer implementation for Java / msgpack.org[Java]

jsonschema - JSON Schema validation library

ultrajson - Ultra fast JSON decoder and encoder written in C with Python bindings