As far as documentation, I've found Django's approach to work better for me. It seems to be the norm in the Python community to document well and comprehensively. Python is the only computer language I've seen where, according to the creators, "Strunk and White apply" (http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/) . With Rails, the community approach toward documentation too often seems geared toward beginners. Many gems provide a "copy this, generate these files, and type that" tutorial or a screencast. I'm reminded of the code-generating wizards you'd see in Microsoft Visual Studio back in the day. Often there's no documentation beyond an initial tutorial. When I tried Rails last year I found myself spending the majority of my time Googling and sifting through blog posts of varying age and quality in an often futile attempt to find what I needed, whereas with Django the majority of my time is spent actually coding, and if I really can't find something in the documentation, Django's code is so readable it's often easy to open up the source and discover what it's doing.