PHP Frameworks

Laravel

When speaking about Laravel, we are referring to Laravel version 4 and beyond. Laravel 4 was released in 2013 and represented a complete rewrite of the framework. The functionality of the framework was decoupled into separate components, which were managed with Composer, instead of everything being in one single huge code repository.

Laravel declares itself as a framework for rapid development with a simple and beautiful syntax which is easy to learn, read, and maintain. It is the most popular framework in 2016. According to Google trends, it is three times more popular than other frameworks, and on GitHub, it has two times more stars than competitors.

Symfony

Symfony 2 was released in 2011, but it must not be confused with Symfony 1, which was a totally different framework with different underlying principles. Fabien Potencier created Symfony 2, and the current version is 3.2, which is an incremental version of Symfony 2. Therefore, they are often called simply Symfony2/3.

Like Laravel 4, Symfony 2 is designed as a set of decoupled components. There are two benefits here: We can replace any component in a Symfony project, and we can take and use any Symfony component in a non-Symfony project. Symfony components can serve as great code examples and they are used in a lot of open source projects such as Drupal, phpBB, and Codeception. In fact, Laravel itself uses no less than 14 Symfony components. Understanding Symfony thus gives you many benefits when working with other projects.

See detailed comparisons in

• Installation
• Configurations
• Routing and Controller
• Template Engine
• Dependency Injection
• Object Relational Mapping (ORM)
• REST API

And picking the Winner: Symfony or Laravel?