Nowadays, web development is one of the main activities in software development, with a wide array of tools that make it difficult for developers to deal with its heterogeneity. The appearance of Ruby on Rails has brought a new paradigm to current web development frameworks, and has shown how an agile web development framework can simplify the development process, with a considerable productivity increment. There are several Java-based alternatives to Ruby on Rails, such as Grails, Roma, Trails, JBoss Seam or Sails, with different approaches to the reuse of previous Java frameworks and technologies. This paper proposes a comparison model for agile web frameworks to facilitate developers the selection of the most suitable for each case. This paper reviews the state of the art of agile web frameworks. Afterwards, a comparison model based on a set of evaluation criteria is defined for web framework evaluation. Finally, the model is applied to the most popular web frameworks.