The growing prevalence of code-mixed text on social media presents unique challenges for sen- timent analysis, particularly in low-resource languages like Tamil and Tulu. This paper ex- plores sentiment classification in Tamil-English and Tulu-English code-mixed datasets using both machine learning (ML) and deep learn- ing (DL) approaches. The ML model utilizes TF-IDF feature extraction combined with a Logistic Regression classifier, while the DL model employs FastText embeddings and a BiLSTM network enhanced with an attention mechanism. Experimental results reveal that the ML model outperforms the DL model in terms of macro F1-score for both languages. Specifically, for Tamil, the ML model achieves a macro F1-score of 0.46, surpassing the DL model’s score of 0.43. For Tulu, the ML model significantly outperforms the DL model, achiev- ing 0.60 compared to 0.48. This performance disparity is more pronounced in Tulu due to its smaller dataset size of 13,308 samples com- pared to Tamil’s 31,122 samples, highlight- ing the data efficiency of ML models in low- resource settings. The study provides insights into the strengths and limitations of each ap- proach, demonstrating that traditional ML tech- niques remain competitive for code-mixed sen- timent analysis when data is limited. These findings contribute to ongoing research in mul- tilingual NLP and offer practical implications for applications such as social media monitor- ing, customer feedback analysis, and conversa- tional AI in Dravidian languages.