Is Rails quicker and easier than, say, Django? Sure. Is it quicker and easier by enough to make it worth having another language in your stack? Not really, IME.
Laravel[1] is pretty close, and PHP has some big advantages over Ruby for performance and deployment.
If you had told me 5 years ago that I'd be recommending PHP as an alternative vs. RoR I wouldn't have believed you, but the PHP world has improved in ways that I wouldn't have thought possible.
Laravel may be based on the idea of Rails but in terms of programmer happiness it doesn't come close. A typical file of idiomatic PHP code reads like stodgy old Java and contains about 60% blank lines and doc comments as recommended by PSRs. Rails, by contrast, is elegantly concise and has fantastic metaprogramming.
