Is Laravel faster than Django?

Performance is close enough that it rarely decides the choice. Both are synchronous frameworks at their core, both have async capabilities (Laravel via Octane and queues, Django via ASGI and async views), and both are typically bottlenecked by the database rather than the framework in real applications. Laravel with Octane keeps the framework in memory between requests for a performance boost; Django with ASGI and an async deployment handles concurrent I/O well. For the vast majority of web applications, both frameworks are fast enough and the database optimisation matters far more than the framework choice.