Just wanted to anecdotally affirm whalesalad's experiences with my own. I desperately wanted to like Django more than Rails (I just really appreciate python as a language), but I find projects much quicker to build in Rails. It really is the convention-over-configuration magic that makes the difference. There's less to do in Rails to add commonly used web/crud functionality - but it's much less explicit and relies on you getting all the conventions correct. Rails is really the only framework that I've found fairly hard to learn, simply because you have to memorize the conventions to know e.g. where to pluralize and what magic helper methods will have been auto-generated. It should be noted I've never worked on a large Django project - I suspect once a site's data structure and main functionality has been nailed down and you get a larger team involved, Python and Django's 'explicit is better than implicit' design philosophy will start to provide increases in efficiency.