Sure. But, for instance, is Django as tied to the active record pattern as is Rails? And yes, I know you can swap out persistence layers in modern Rails, which is good (because active record is utter bilge), but who does that?
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For instance, if you want to use a class like it was a MySQL table, you could include a few ActiveModel classes which will make things for ActiveSupport helpers work with them.
http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveModel.html - pick and choose what you want in your classes. This was one of the major changes in Rails 3
EDIT: just to clear it up, by ActiveModel I mean Model. Rails is convention over configuration and adheres to the MVC pattern and philosophy
Web frameworks really only differ in philosophy, and in this case, both are batteries-included, monolithic frameworks. They are practically identical solutions.