As a developer working on projects using both approaches, it would be hard for me to pick a clear winner. One key difference for less experienced developers is

As a developer working on projects using both approaches, it would be hard for me to pick a clear winner. One key difference for less experienced developers is that ORMs are usually integrated for you as part of a bigger framework (Django, Rails...). This provides some guidelines to get started on a more or less sane way. On the other hand plain SQL usually relies directly on the database client (or a thin layer like SQLAlchemy core) that requires you to make many decisions about the architecture upfront. I feel that one needs to experiment a lot (and fail a bit) before getting this part right.