I am looking to do some tinkering with openGL and Python and haven't been able to find good reasons for using PyOpenGl versus pyglet
Which would you recommend and why?
Start with pyglet. It contains the best high-level API, which contains all you need to get started, from opening a window to drawing sprites and OpenGL primitives using their friendly and powerful Sprite and Batch classes.
Later, you might also want to write your own lower-level code, that makes calls directly to OpenGL functions such as glDrawArrays, etc. You can do this using pyglet's OpenGL bindings, or using PyOpenGL's. The good news is that whichever you use, you can insert such calls right into the middle of your existing pyglet application, and they will 'just work'. Transitioning your code from Pyglet to PyOpenGL is fairly easy, so this is not a decision you need to worry about too much upfront. The trades-off between the two are:
PyOpenGL's bindings make the OpenGL interface more friendly and pythonic. For example, you can pass vertex arrays in many different forms, ctypes arrays, numpy arrays, plain lists, etc, and PyOpenGL will convert them into something OpenGL can use. Things like this make PyOpenGL really easy and convenient.
pyglet's OpenGL bindings are automatically generated, and are not as friendly to use as PyOpenGL. For example, sometimes you will have to manually create ctypes objects, in order to pass 'C pointer' kinds of args to OpenGL. This can be fiddly. The plus side though, is pyglet's bindings tends to be significantly faster.
This implies that there is an optimal middle ground: Use pyglet for windowing, mouse events, sound, etc. Then use PyOpenGL's friendly API when you want to make direct OpenGL function calls. Then when optimising, replace just the small percentage of performance-critical PyOpenGL calls that lie within your inner render loop with the pyglet equivalents. For me, this gives me between 2 and 4 times faster framerates, with PyOpenGL's convenience for 90% of my code.
PyOpenGl or pyglet?