Compare time with time zone (Z at the end) with datetime

Question

I am trying to compare two dates - today and date from db. Db date format is 2021-10-04T21:00:00Z and today date is 2023-08-11 09:06:10 (%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S).

How to compare these dates?

I tried this:

from datetime import datetime
from time import strftime, gmtime

today_time = strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S", gmtime())
date_format = '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S'

due_date = datetime.strptime(date_from_db, date_format)
if due_date < today_time:
    # ...

And I get following exception:

ValueError: time data '2021-10-04T21:00:00Z' does not match format '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S'

How to resolve this?