Which is better Django or Rails ?

It depends on who you ask. Some test show Django and Python are faster. As far as hosting, both are going to be best served from a VPS account instead of a traditional shared account so the hosting is the same. And both have good online docs. Rails has more printed books though.

It’s just a matter of which one clicks and if you happen to know any Ruby or Python going in to this choice.

They are both excellent platforms. With all things being equal, we chose Django because it seemed more robust and had better documentation. (Fluther is built on Django).

That being said, Rails has some advantages of popularity: It’s probably easier to hire a Rails developer. I agree with @astrofoo about hosting on a VPS, but if you’re looking for something like EngineYard, Rails might be better.

At the real heart of the matter, I think Rails is a little better at getting started in the very beginning, but once you’re started Django runs better and bigger in the long term.

Ultimately, you can’t go wrong with either. And there’s something to be said for spending a fews days with each and see which feels right to you.

I’m a little late to the discussion here but since I have been dealing with exactly this same issue I will chime in. I am the Chief Information Officer in the corporate world (for a large national company with lots of offices). They wanted me to build an intranet application that is really just a suite of many applications. For instance they want each user to authenticate via active directory automatically, then be able to see a dashboard that shows their paid time off (sick days, vacation days, personal days, etc.), the ability to request time off to their manager, view memos, have work items assigned to them, micro-blogging, etc, etc also there is to be an inventory system that keeps track of all hardware in the building and asset management.

Traditionally we use ASP.NET for everything in-house but recent budget cuts made me look to open source. Of course you can’t miss Ruby on Rails because its so popular. So, I decided to take a look at that, also Django was getting a lot of buzz from other colleagues and I also decided to look into some PHP frameworks. I ran through some tutorials for Rails and it seemed to awesome! So, I sent the CTO off to get training for the developers and myself (I still code everyday despite the title). After about a few days of training and a few days of development I heard some griping. The guys just didn’t like Ruby very much. After using it myself a couple of days I found it to be rather ugly as well. I mean it looks pretty but its basically like Perl with a nicer syntax.

Also, people said that Rails was too “magical” and most didn’t like the framework very because of its monolithic approach to development. So, I moved onto Django and Python and got everyone training for that. After about 2 days everyone was singing its praises and we started development. Granted we just started writing these applications but I find Django to be excellent. Its very concise yet flexible and you can’t really beat the admin pages. Also Python is an excellent language – everyone is loving it and I would say that we could probably use Django for a lot of different things not just news-type, social-networking, content-driven sites. I see no reason why Django couldn’t be used for heavy processing applications as well. In fact I am going to ask that question to the fluther world. Anyway my $.02 like 2 years later.