Rails for straight up CRUD is top, autogenerated things etc
however if your app doesn't fit the standard crud pattern you end just fiddling with a lot of things that you shouldn't and in that case I recommend Django which provides enough flexibility while providing a good base. There's less magic in Django
If you're building a pure SaaS app then Rails is perfect. If you need SaaS + more complex backend services like coordinating tons of webhooks I'd choose Elixir. Documentation sites and light server apps I'd use Node.
Go and Rust fill in lots of gaps for more serious performance stuff.
FWIW modern Rails is fairly magic-free also. They learned. With ActiveJob now part of the framework you get event queues/async processing and whatnot as part of the batteries.
I'm a fanboi, so I am biased, but Rails is still pretty great in 2026 for general business purposes.
Serious question, as someone who started his professional developer career as a RoR developer in 2012: Isn't vibe-coding top for straight up CRUD?
I'm not trying to be glib. The thing that seemed magic to me at that time was all the scaffolding that Rails provided with a few simple commands, making it possible to quickly build something that let the user authenticate and enter and display data. Sure, Ruby itself and the culture around it back then was also great and will always have a place in my heart. But the whole convention-over-configuration and scaffolding thing, that was what I liked so much about it, and I never found that in any other language/framework combo in a way that felt as smooth.
But now, I use AI for scaffolding, and for my side-projects often never have to touch code.
So why would I choose something for a CRUD application that might give me headaches down the road, when there's a possibility that the app might morph into something less conventional, when I could use *any* language/framework that's not as rigid and have the scaffold be built by AI?
I get it if you enjoy actually writing code. But I don't quite get the benefits if the goal is to have something working quickly and be able to potentially build it out to something that is not served that well by RoR.