Both web frameworks will help you rapidly create a web site, so they are approximately equivalent (though not exactly, of course.) So also consider the language

Both web frameworks will help you rapidly create a web site, so they are approximately equivalent (though not exactly, of course.) So also consider the language you'd be using. Look at Ruby and Python, and see which you prefer. I personally prefer Python's syntax and style, Python has many more libraries and it's been around longer than Ruby, and I've noticed that among "top" tier coders they tend to prefer it over Ruby. (Not all, but most.) But Ruby has many strengths, and can do a few tricks that Python can't, to it's credit. Python apps tend to execute faster than Ruby apps. It appears to be easier to scale up Django/Python apps than Ruby/Rails apps, though a lot of the same techniques can be used for both since they're language/framework agnostic (using a clustered architecture with a scalable number of server nodes, caching aggressively, choosing good algorithms, etc.) I was at the same decision point over a year ago, did both tutorials, and decided I needed to focus more on the languages to help break what might otherwise have been a tie. With either framework you'll be a lot better off than the typical "web COBOL" stack: Java + Servlet/JSP + XML.