Whenever I have tried to use Numba, I find it is slower than standard python. OTOH, Julia just works. Gives me the same performance as C.

I actually both in terms of speed, and in terms of writing code they are remarkably similar approaches.

numba forces you into certain ways of writing code to achieve significant speed ups, but usually that's not too restrictive.

If you are used to writing numerical python code, you'll feel write at home in Julia - especially with the amazing PyCall module.

I haven't used numba or benchmarked it, so I'm not really qualified to comment. I do however vastly prefer the MATLAB-like syntax of julia to that of python.