I've done projects in both Django and Rails. Your list of Rails drawbacks is weak. The magic can bite you but most of the time it doesn't. Documentation on any

I've done projects in both Django and Rails. Your list of Rails drawbacks is weak. The magic can bite you but most of the time it doesn't. Documentation on any open source project is usually pretty bad. Both Rails and Django have about the same level of documentation at this point. The API is no more inconsistent than anything else. The minus I encountered with Django is that it isn't as far along with the nice auxiliary pieces that exist alongside Rails. Gems are much better than easy_install or eggs. Phusion passenger is easier to deal with than... whatever Django is doing these days. Capistrano is better than Fabric. Heroku is better than App Engine. What I liked about Django is that integrating other Python libs was easy, and some of them are way better than the Ruby equivalents. PIL is way better than any of the Ruby image manipulation libraries. Django also makes it easier to do GIS stuff out of the box. In my experience the REAL problem with rails is that if you're actually doing high-load transactional sites, like serious e-commerce systems, it is not up for the task. The successful Rails sites I built mostly had few inserts and a lot of reads. Tons of transactions == meltdown in ways neither I nor professional rails consultants understood. Those pieces were ultimately re-architected in Java (with some JRuby to help out). I'm not convinced Django would help with a site like this.