Rails currently wins if you want to make a "typical" web application, which allows people to sign up with email/password/Facebook. Implementing these things wit

Rails currently wins if you want to make a "typical" web application, which allows people to sign up with email/password/Facebook. Implementing these things with Django requires uncomfortable tweaking, because custom user models have not been available until Django 1.5 (still unreleased). It is also very painful to make asset pipelines work in Django (SCSS & CoffeeScript compilation and minification). There are various solutions which require various amounts of tweaking, and which can break in unexpected ways on SCSS syntax errors etc. In Rails, all this just works out-of-the-box. And lastly, Django's app ecosystem is very tied into the Django ORM data model, which is currently very tied into MySQL/Postgres. If you want to use MongoDB (with MongoEngine), most existing Django apps won't work with it. On the Rails side, Mongoid is an established ODM, and there are existing gems to make most things work with MongoDB without any tweaking. This means you will have the email/password/Facebook authentication (Devise/Omniauth), RailsAdmin, CanCan permissions etc. working right away, and your whole web app can run on MongoDB if you want. So, even though I'm a long-time Django user and fan, I think it just hasn't kept up with the times. Nowadays Rails works better and is more productive for typical new web projects. (But realtime/single-page-apps are a different story, there I lean towards Derby&Meteor.)