PHP frameworks are incomparable to other frameworks when it comes to web application development.

But, there are various PHP frameworks available in the industry to be used by web developers. The list includes-

  • Laravel
  • Symfony
  • CodeIgniter
  • Yii
  • Phalcon
  • Zend
  • CakePHP
  • FuelPHP
  • Slim
  • PHPixie
  • And, the list still continues

There are various similarities among these frameworks that also marks as the reasons to choose PHP frameworks:

  • Have no license cost as they are open source
  • Make the development code reusable
  • Eases the code maintainable
  • Ensure tighter security for the web application
  • Speed up the web development
  • Inculcate Object-oriented programming tools
  • Make the web application flexible, scalable, and even efficient
  • Efficient unit testing

But, let’s consider only highly popular PHP frameworks and see what each of these highly popular PHP frameworks has to offer for the robust, reliable, and fast web application development.

Top PHP Frameworks and its Comparison

Laravel

Laravel-Framwork

Compared to all the other PHP frameworks, Laravel is the newest one. Though being the newest one, it has become the favorite of all the web developers out there. All thanks to its easy-to-implement code functionalities and in-depth documentation for each release.

Laravel follows the Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture that comes with various built-in functionalities which the web developers can use while developing web applications.

Also, Laravel offers the Artisan command that allows developers to quickly develop web applications.

Apart from these, the web developers can easily develop the multi-lingual websites using Laravel.

Documentation

One of the best documentation is available for Laravel. Web developers use Laracasts which is just like a Netflix app which can be used to learn Laravel. In fact, there are many other documentation available for each release. That means the web developers enjoy learning Laravel and implementing the same.

Security

When it comes to security, Laravel has the highly efficient security features that is applied to the web application. In fact, Laravel has its own authentication system which restricts the unauthorized access to the web application.

Template Engines

One of the most amazing features of Laravel is its Blade templating engine which offers various templates that make the following tasks easy and quick for the web developers-

  • Authentication
  • Caching
  • Queuing
  • RESTful Routing
  • Sessions

Database Support

Database integrations and communications becomes easy and quick with Laravel. The web developers can even share the databases every time when a new developer joins the team. Database working is highly efficient in Laravel.

Rapid Development

Among all the other PHP frameworks, Laravel has all the capabilities, features, integrations, and configurations that can contribute to rapid app development.

Community

Laravel became popular among the web developers much faster than any other PHP frameworks. All because of its easy to learn and implement code. That leads to Laravel’s community number to as high as 40,000.

Symfony

symfony-Framwork

Symfony is another popular PHP framework to develop web applications, APIs, microservices, and web services.

Symfony consists of reusable PHP components and libraries which the web developers can utilize while developing apps. The developers can use these reusable libraries irrespective of their Symfony framework usage.

Most of the developers consider using Symfony for larger and complex apps. But, as Laravel is based on Symfony, Laravel has all the benefits that Symfony has. In fact, Laravel is better than Symfony.

Documentation

Symfony has the well-organized documentation just like Laravel. The only difference is web developers enjoy learning from Laravel documentation due to the intuitiveness of the documentation.

Security

Security features in Symfony is quite different from Laravel. There are components that needs to be used to provide app security. But, Laravel’s security features are easy to implement which makes it one step closer to the hearts of web developers and even it saves time.

Template Engines

Symfony uses templates such as Twig templating system with which web developers can create their own tags and Twig decodes those templates to the plain PHP language. But, these templates has no comparison with Blade templating engine of Laravel.

Database Support

Compared to Laravel, Symfony supports more databases and even Yii. Symfony also supports various libraries which is not easy to configure and utilize in the projects. That’s the reason why Laravel wins here as well.

Rapid Development

Definitely there is rapid development in Symfony. Also, Laravel is influenced by Symfony so Laravel has more features and templates that allow web developers to develop much faster. When looking to upgrade and maintain the app, Symfony has much speed but the upgrades need to be very simple which is not the case with Laravel.

Community

The community of Symfony is as high as 35,000 which is a lesser number compared to Laravel’s 40,000. Though both of these PHP frameworks have powerful community and work towards making it a success, Laravel is still on the top.

CodeIgniter

codeigniter-Framwork

CodeIgniter is a PHP framework that was developed with an intention to build dynamic web apps. It comes up with an easy and hassle-free installation process that does not require much time and steps to configure.

Due to the lack of strict MVC architecture, CodeIgniter is not much used today by the web developers. But, it gives the full freedom to web developers to use their own coding and it also allows them to add third-party plugins if they need additional and complex functionalities.

Documentation

CodeIgniter comes with an extremely simple documentation but it cannot be compared with the documentation pattern and the amount of documents available with Laravel.

Security

There is no comparison of the security aspect between CodeIgniter and Laravel as Laravel is much stronger with its own authentication system.

Database Support

CodeIgniter supports various Databases but it does not allow the web developers to streamline database pattern relocation unlike Laravel.

Rapid Development

CodeIgniter provides a simplified toolkit to get started with the web development, but the developers enjoy developing web apps using Laravel more compared to CodeIgniter.

Community

Both CodeIgniter and Laravel has the support of powerful communities. But, the community of CodeIgniter is not at all as high as Laravel.

Yii

Yii-Framwork

Just like CodeIgniter, Yii is also a light-weight PHP framework with an easy installation process. Here, in this framework, PHP integrates with CodeCeption testing framework to allow the web developers to even test the web app.

Documentation

Yii does not come with stronger documentation when compared to Laravel as they even come up with learning as if you are watching series on Netflix.

Security

Yii framework has great security features which the web developers always loved. But, after Laravel’s inception, its authentication features beat every other PHP frameworks.

Rapid Development

Both of these PHP frameworks were developed in order to achieve rapid application development. But, there are templates and even libraries that allow Laravel to win over Yii framework for the rapid app development.

Community

Obviously, Yii framework has a community of developers who support Yii. Though being a new PHP framework, Laravel beats Yii on this as well.

Phalcon

Phalcon-Framwork

Phalcon is a PHP framework that was developed in the year 2012 which instantly gained popularity among the web developers as being a new one it was as fast as falcon. It uses less memory to download and work on the same.

A well-documented PHP framework, Phalcon, is easy to learn and implement. But, there is no comparison of documentation pattern between Phalcon and Laravel.

This PHP framework is written in C and C++ which resulted in the speed to optimize the performance of the web developers. Phalcon consists of various features such as security, caching, asset management, and more which were similar to Laravel but not that efficient when compared to Laravel.

The speed at which Laravel became popular among the web developers, Phalcon’s demand and craze decreased.

Zend

Zend-Framwork

Zend is a PHP framework that is used to develop highly complex web applications. This framework is popular among the businesses that has high-end web application development requirements.

Being able to develop complex web apps, Zend helps to make web apps that performs amazingly. The only challenge is to learn, absorb, utilize, and work around it as its huge amount of documentation is not that simple and easy for web developers to figure out.

So, when Laravel remains the favorite of all the PHP developers.

Conclusion: Laravel tops the list of PHP Frameworks

Recently, we shared a popularity comparison between Laravel, Symfony, Yii, and Zend while talking about why enterprises need Laravel development services :

why-enterprises-need-Laravel-development-services

Looking at the above trendin chart and comparisons, it clearly means that Laravel wins over all the other PHP frameworks among the developers, the development companies and even among the business owners.

That’s the reason why you can choose Laravel for your next project. It completely depends on you whether you want to hire a Laravel developer dedicated to your web development or choose the Laravel development services provider.

In short, whatever you choose, go with Laravel PHP Framework.