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Basically, Symphony is designed to build websites and Rails to build web applications.

Advantages of Symphony CMS over Rails

• Deployment : Symphony CMS use PHP/mySQL so it is pretty cheap and easy to find a good hosting solution
• User Interface : The admin dashboard is very clean and straightforward, plus it allows you to make some modifications to the website online.
• Data sources : As Symphony is based on Xslt, virtually any XML feed can be parsed very easily into the website. I use this to integrate my Tumblr and other blogs directly into my main layout
• Community : People working on Symphony are very active so the forum is a very good place to ask questions and be answered quickly

Advantages of Rails over Symphony :

• Controllers : As you build everything from scratch, you have better control on the methods to be used with your classes, so you can add any specific behavior you like during database IO.
• Gem : Rails has been used for any kind of projects from the smallest to the biggest, so you have a lot of libraries that you can use directly
• Internationalization : For the same reason, the multi-language on Rails is very easy. I run across some problems with Symphony in adding multiple languages, but it was one year ago so it should be fixed now.
• Documentation : You will find tons of blogs, screencasts, online courses about Rails.
• Unit testing : No unit testing for Symphony so far

Another thing about Symphony is that you may have to learn XSLT - and use PHP. The framework outputs very clean and efficient code, but it is way less convenient to write than Rails.