Having used both extensively, I vastly prefer DRF.

Tastypie is nice if you want to bang out a rest interface directly to your models quickly.

I prefer DRF for pretty much anything else. Two reasons:

1. There's more tools in the toolbox for simple but arbitrary problems. Need a one-off endpoint that takes a POST and returns json and is throttled? The @api_view decorator and company make it easy: http://www.django-rest-framework.org/api-guide/views#functio...

2. DRF is a lot more easily extensible, and that extensibility is well documented. Tastypie's documentation is pretty good, but DRF's is great. I often found myself digging around in tastypie's source figuring how exactly to punch holes and make it do what I want.

I used both for almost a year and while I really enjoyed working with tastypie, I found Django Rest Framework to be even better.

- I think Rest Framework's documentation is way better than tastypie's.

- I found tastypie's source code to be overly complicated, while DRF was a little bit better

- The browsable API is really nice

- I love DRF's API, such a Class Based Views, it felt like the continuation of Django, instead of a complete new thing.

In my personal experience django rest is far easier & clear how do things. Also, the REST admin is nice.

I think is the closest in python to the (IMHO) best API-framework thing that I have used (http://www.remobjects.com).

Tastypie is great if the way it works out of the box is exactly how you want your API to work. (And for some people, that's probably true.) If not, it's kind of a pain to hack in customizations.