Laravel vs Symfony – A Comparison of 2 Popular PHP Frameworks

In this piece, we’re doing to discuss Laravel vs Symfony – two prominent web application development frameworks available to PHP developers.

In fact, numerous reports have shown that Laravel and Symfony are among the top list of most popular PHP web development frameworks out there. Likewise, Google Trends show the increasing popularity of these two frameworks among PHP programmers.

Consequently it’s worth looking at Laravel vs Symfony to learn their comparative advantages and disadvantages.

READ: CakePHP vs Laravel: Key Things You Need To Know

Laravel vs Symfony – What’s the deal with Laravel?

Laravel is one of the most popular PHP web application development framework developed by Taylor Otwell. It was designed to make web development easier, and follows the model-view-controller (MVC) web application architect design pattern.

It was introduced back in 2011 and is a prominent member of what was then regarded as a new breed of web development frameworks. It’s open-source, free to use and provides all you need to get started with building dynamic database driven web applications.

As of the date of this piece, the current version of Laravel is version 5.6. It provides long term support (LTS) and is free for commercial use under MIT license. With over 17,000 packages in it, there are over 80,000 open source projects built on Laravel.

Furthermore, a look at StackOverflow shows over 70,000 questions related to this popular framework with over 1,400 contributors and over 8,000 github stars rating!

Need we say more? Laravel is popular – in fact very popular among a teeming number of PHP web developers around the world.

So what are the advantages of Laravel when compared to Symfony? Well, there are quite a number of them:

• It provides advanced options for building queries
• Its authentication processes are more refined and simplified
• Say bye-bye to manual maintenance and leverage its automatic loading platform
• Handle new application events at the object level instead of string level
• You can easily perform migration of data as well as overall management of the application

READ: CodeIgniter vs Laravel – The Difference Between Laravel and CodeIgniter

Laravel vs Symfony – How about Symfony?

On the other hand, Symfony is yet another very popular PHP web development framework. It was launched back in 2011 and its current version at the time of this write up is version 4.0. It also provides long term support (LTS) versions and is free for commercial use under MIT license just like Laravel.

Comparatively, Symfony’s statistics are just banging as Laravel’s. It’s loaded with over 7,500 packages and over 25,000 open source projects running on it. StackOverflow is awash with questions (over 60,000 of them) on Symfony. With over 1,400 contributors constantly supporting it and over 15,000 github stars rating.

Furthermore, it may interest you to know that Laravel was in fact built off of Symfony. Same goes for many popular web applications such as Drupal and phpBB.

READ: Laravel vs Django: Detailed Pros & Cons, Security, Routing, and more
So now you get the gist of Symfony but what are the advantages? What goodies does it offer? Well, let’s take a quick look:

• You can count on its reusability of components which saves time to launch and total cost of ownership
• With HTTP-centric request/response paradigm, it’s adaptable and optimal in performance
• It gives you a mixture of options to extend the framework when developing your application
• It’s definitely faster than most other PHP frameworks out there

READ: Laravel vs Django: Detailed Pros & Cons, Security, Routing, and more

Laravel vs Symfony – Now What?

Both Symfony and Laravel implement object relational mapping (ORM) methodology. This is very useful when it comes to the handling and conversion of data. Furthermore, they both help avoid mistakes during changes in code through their support of continuous integration service. You’ll come to rely on this especially when working with large development teams.

Finally, each web application’s needs are different so it’s important you do more research on both frameworks and decide which framework is best suited for your project.