What is the best alternative to CodeIgniter?

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score 695 · Answer 1

Laravel 5

Top Pro

Good for building RESTful APIs

With migrations, powerful and intuitive Eloquent CRUD, resource routing, and simple JSON response out of the box, a complete REST API can be written in hours. See More

Top Con

Uses too much magic methods

It complicates debugging and autocompletion. See More

Top Pro

Comes with an excellent built-in ORM

Laravel's Eloquent ORM is a simple and fast Object-Relational Mapping which helps with organizing the application's database. It supports the most popular databases (MySQL, Postgres, SQLite, etc.) out of the box. See More

Top Con

Bloated

While the speed doesn't seem to be an issue with it (on local tests), in production it may be hindered. The framework creates a ton of files and folders, some of which your app might not even use. Not good if you don't like having a ton of folders and rigid non-standard PHP folder structure for development. See More

Top Pro

Good documentation

Laravel's documentation is thorough and very good. It covers everything and is very helpful to experienced and new users alike. See More

Top Con

Hard to use model properties

You need to check all model properties in database to know it exists, or declare all them manually. See More

Top Pro

Handles event queuing

Laravel supports event queuing and it does so in a very simple way. To create an event that should be queued just run: php artisan handler:event SendPurchaseConfirmation --event=PodcastWasPurchased --queued This creates a handler that implements the Illuminate\Contracts\Queue\ShouldBeQueued interface. Now when this handler is called it will automatically be queued by the event dispatcher. See More

Top Con

Steep learning curve

While a lot of times you can write things in plain PHP, it will hinder you down the line when you want to use core features and find that you have to rewrite code which then causes issues throughout the app. Documentation is good, but you need to know what you are looking for and practical examples are non-existent. Many features have been updated throughout the versions in such a short time that tutorials you find online are confusing to sort through outdated tutorials and guides that no longer work or have been depreciated. See More

Top Pro

Comes with its own CLI

Laravel comes out of the box with it's own CLI called Artisan. With Artisan developers can do several different tasks such as migrating databases, seeding databases, clearing the cache and much much more. See More

Top Con

Poor performance

Top Pro

Easy to write web apps with authentication

Laravel comes with Authentication capabilities and a fully-powered Auth class out of the box. For passwords it uses bcrypt. See More

Top Con

Follows bad design practices

Uses bad practices, like Singletons, Magic models, Middleware. See More

Top Pro

Easy to learn

Top Pro

Gives developers a great degree of freedom in how they set up their project structure

Laravel allows for free configuration and does not force developers to use a single project structure, instead they can change it to how they wish. See More

Top Pro

Can use Symfony components

Laravel uses many libraries built for the Symfony PHP framework. Many of these libraries are well-built and have been tested by users before. Since the point of using a web framework is to shorten development time and to avoid reinventing the wheel for problems that have already been solved, then it's logical for a framework to use libraries already built to solve problems that have already been solved. See More

Top Pro

Extremely powerful template system

Laravel has a powerful template system called Blade. It's quite similar to Twig or Moustache with lots of curly braces but the real power comes from the usage of PHP code directly in the view. Blade templates compile directly to raw PHP and are processed in the server when a request is made. See More

Top Pro

Gulp tasks in the form of Laravel Elixir

In Laravel 5.0 they added Laravel Elixir, which provides an API for using Gulp tasks for Laravel applications. Elixir supports several CSS preprocessors and even some test tools. But it's still in the early stages of development and it will be developed even further in the following releases. With more methods and more Gulp tasks supported. See More

Top Pro

Great Ecosystem

Has a great Ecosystem with SAAS like: Forge, Envoyer, Nova & from 3rd parties like oh-dear See More

Top Pro

Great Community

Specs

License:MIT License

Initial Release:June 2011

695 164

score 33 · Answer 2

Leaf

Top Pro

Simple structure

Leaf has a simple structure and easy code. See More

Top Con

Lack of a database layer

Has inbuilt connection methods for only mysqli and pdo. See More

Top Pro

Useful classes

Contains classes for managing requests, responses, cookies, logging, views, HTTP caching, and more. See More

Top Pro

Beautiful, well organised documentation

Top Pro

REST-based

Specs

License:MIT

Price:Free

Initial Release:October 2019

Written in:PHP

See All Specs

33 0

score 115 · Answer 3

Phalcon

Top Pro

Extremely fast

Since the framework is and extension built in C it's extremely fast and efficient. It's actually one of the fastest PHP frameworks, and according to some benchmarks it's the fastest framework out there. See More

Top Con

Not for shared hosting

Phalcon needs root access to install the PHP extension which is written in C. Developers who plan on using Phalcon must use VPS or Cloud Hosting with root access available. See More

Top Pro

Open source

Phalcon is open source and is available under the BSD License. See More

Top Con

Require good programming skills

Not so easy to use if you want to gain the best from it. See More

Top Pro

Uses Volt template engine

The Volt template engine, which is embedded into Phalcon itself takes it's inspiration from the Jinja template engine and as such it's nice to look at, with a clear and understandable syntax. Volt also compiles very fast, like Phalcon itself, so it avoids being a bottleneck for the framework's overall speed. See More

Top Con

Debugging requires knowledge of C

You need to be a C programmer to debug Zephir or C code. Or if Phalcon is not maintained anymore and you have a problem and don't have much skills in C, you will be hard-pressed to find a C programmer to fix it. See More

Top Pro

Very flexible project structure

You can set up the base project as you want. It's very flexible See More

Top Pro

Clean and light project code

Since the framework code is not in the project directory, the code is light and clean. See More

Top Pro

Customizable with Zephir

Zephir is a high-level language designed to create PHP extensions easily by PHP programmers with no knowledge in C. Zephir does this by compiling directly to C and then the C program is in turn compiled to be run as a PHP extension. This, coupled with the fact that Zephir's syntax is very similar to PHP makes it a perfect way for PHP developers to use it for customizing Phalcon. See More

Top Pro

Loosely coupled components

Some components can be used as standalone packages like models, views, etc.. See More

Specs

Written in:PHP

See All Experiences

115 13

score 339 · Answer 4

Fat-Free Framework

Top Pro

Simple development set up

Top Con

Community is a bit small, so if you get stuck you have trouble finding answers via google

Searching for "fat-free minification" on google sometimes doesn't give you the "right" answer. See More

Top Pro

Lightweight without losing functionality

The framework is very lightweight and fast. Even though it's pretty light, it still does not lose a lot of functionality. See More

Top Con

Backward incompatible within minor version

There are serious incompatibilities even between minor versions (eg. between 3.6.0 and 3.6.2). Developers exhibit complete lack of understanding what is versioning of product (and which changes should be integrated in which versions), which makes this framework unsuitable for serious work. Development is slow, stable versions are rare and not treated seriously. See More

Top Pro

Shortened development time

Building an application that processes a URL (display a page, submit a form, invoke Ajax, etc.) requires very little code and can be achieved very quickly. Allows developers to focus on the application itself and not the plumbing. See More

Top Con

Default ORM doesn't support joins

The default ORM for this framework is missing some features such as joins. But it's important to keep in mind that it's a small plugin, only 23KB in size which still can be replaced with a larger ORM if needed. An alternative the drop in f3-cortex ORM which is popular, and supported by the community, which supports Joins and much more. See More

Top Pro

Easy to get started

After you download the framework it is very simple to get an app up and running very quickly. Makes it easy for newer PHP and web app developers to start using a MVC framework. See More

Top Con

Need more example of working code and directory structures and usage with JS and CSS frameworks

Top Pro

Very stable

You know those frameworks that have updated 5 times during your own development phase? Well, F3 sees one or two updates per year. Never had any issues updating or upgrading. F3 just works. See More

Top Con

Abandoned

The project has been abandoned since 2016. (not abandoned since 2019 with multiple new releases) See More

Top Pro

ORM supports sql, nosql, and jig

Top Con

The default template engine is "home made"

Top Pro

Highly modular

Virtually everything is modular. You can choose which modules and libraries to include and to keep the framework as lightweight as possible. See More

Top Con

Lack of video tutorials

While there is a great user guide, compared to other established PHP frameworks, there is a relative shortage of video and written step-by-step tutorials for newbies to learn this framework. See More

Top Pro

FREE structure

Top Pro

No canned coding/directory structure

Freedom to structure your projects' directories and codes as you wish. F3 is a non-opinionated framework : you are entirely free to use the files/API/assets structure that you love. Following a minimalistic approach, F3 tends to avoid adding code and structure that are not strictly necessary, while focusing on what really matters : coding your solution; actually you learn F3 while implementing/coding your project/webapp See More

Top Pro

Multiple view engines

Default view engine is superb and can also work with varieties of PHP view engines including Twig. See More

Top Pro

Vibrant community behind the framework

The community is responsive and helpful in clarifying the aspects of the framework. See More

Top Pro

Very little spin up time

The time to go from knowing nothing about Fat-Free to getting a project completed is very reduced compared to other bulky frameworks. See More

Top Pro

Comprehensive documentation and API reference

Concise and to the point documentation. Includes many examples and complete API reference. See More

Top Pro

Unit testing toolkit

Top Pro

No composer, curl or dependency injectors

You download a zip file and use it by placing require(); statement. No need to use composer, curl or any dependency injector which sometime become a great pain. See More

Top Pro

Very little not included by default

In a framework that's so small, it puts the rest to shame. See More

Top Pro

Self documenting code

Top Pro

Good documentation

With many examples which are easy to follow by new users. See More

Specs

PHP version:5.4+

Default Template Engine:custom

See All Experiences

339 43

score 158 · Answer 5

Symfony

Top Pro

Open Source

Symfony is open source and released under the MIT license. See More

Top Con

Settings

Too many configurations. See More

Top Pro

Easy debugging with a built-in debug toolbar

Symfony comes with a built-in toolbar that helps developers debug their applications during the development phase. The toolbar is also extendable and new components, called panels can be added if needed to help with the debugging process. See More

Top Con

Very hard to install

Setting it up on webhost without a console is difficult. See More

Top Pro

Great plugin ecosystem

One of the greatest strengths of Symfony is it's amazing and large plugin ecosystem, which comes as a result of it's large and dedicated community. Having a large number of plugins means less development time and more productivity. See More

Top Con

Promotes bad development practices

Such as annotations via comments. See More

Top Pro

Highly active community

Symfony has one of the most active communities out of all the PHP frameworks. This is shown by the high number of commits made every day in the GitHub repo. See More

Top Con

Doctrine ORM

Symfony Standard Edition, which is the most widely used distribution, comes integrated with Doctrine, the most resource hogging ORM library. See More

Top Pro

Teaches you good practices

Symfony makes you be a better programmer. You have to deal with the latest object-oriented design patterns such as service-oriented architecture, dependency injection, interface abstraction, and so on. See More

Top Con

You need a lot of files to display a single page

For a simple hello world page you need about 5 files. See More

Top Pro

Uses YAML/XML/PHP/Annotation

Symfony makes use of XML, YAML or PHP annotations to create configurations in order to tell Doctrine on how properties of a certain class should be. See More

Top Pro

Powerful event system

Symfony has a powerful built-in event system that allows you to add flexibility to applications and makes it easier to maintain the codebase down the road. See More

Top Pro

Great templating engine

Uses Twig, which is a simple and easy to learn templating language that can also be used as a standalone engine, outside the framework. See More

Top Pro

Uses Doctrine ORM

Symfony makes use of the Doctrine ORM to add an abstraction layer over the database in order to maintain flexibility without having unnecessary code duplication. See More

Specs

158 31

score 106 · Answer 6

Lumen

Top Pro

Easily upgradable to Laravel

Since it's basically just a minimal version of Laravel, it can be upgraded to a full Laravel app if the need arises. No need for code changes, just import the code to a new Laravel install. See More

Top Con

Built for smaller tasks like APIs

Top Pro

Feature rich

Top Con

It's based off Laravel and inherits its shortcomings

Lumen inherits many shortcomings of Laravel, such as static proxy classes. See More

Top Pro

Highest performing PHP micro-Framework

Lumen is benchmarked at 100/rps (Requests Per Second) faster than Slim v3, which used to be considered the fastest and most performant micro-Framework to date with the ability to handle 1800/rps. (1900/rps vs 1800/rps respectively). See More

Top Con

Made to work alongside Laravel

Lumen as a framework is at it's full potential when used alongside it's older brother. Lumen was created to be used for microservices alongside Laravel, which is used for more user-facing applications. If a project is already using another framework other than Laravel, it would be better to use another microframework for microservices instead of Lumen. See More

Top Pro

Easy to use

Specs

PHP version:7.1.3

See All Experiences

106 14

score 557 · Answer 7

Slim

Top Pro

Well organized and thorough documentation

Slim's documentation is well organized and detailed, every concept is thoroughly explained and it is very helpful for both advanced users and beginners. See More

Top Con

Very little consistency among different versions

There have been quite some changes that break the compatibility between Slim 2 and Slim 3. Even if you learned how to work with the Slim 2, you will find that Slim 3 requires re-training. See More

Top Pro

A good starting point

Slim is minimal and that is a good thing if you want to start from there. It can be easily extended and even supports popular packages that are used in Laravel (like Illuminate\Database (eloquent)) for example. See More

Top Con

Dependency injection is too weak

It is not really dependency injection, but just a configurable container. See More

Top Pro

REST based

REST fans will love the REST based architecture. See More

Top Con

Needs strong bases to create dependencies

The dependency container schema of Slim is one of the biggest PROS and CONS of the framework. It is true that this schema brings so much flexibility to add anything, but another thing that is true is that you need to have strong bases of patterns, and an extensive knowledge of your libraries to convert it into a Slim dependency. See More

Top Pro

Supports tie-ins for Rack-like middleware

Rack is an interface used in Ruby frameworks used to group and order modules, which most of the time are Ruby classes, and specify between them. Slim uses a simple concept for it's middleware. By wrapping HTTP requests and responses it unifies the middleware into a single method call. See More

Top Con

Too minimal

While it's true that Slim is a microframework, it's still too minimal. When used for throwaway projects or simple prototypes, it's perfect. But in the long run, it becomes less and less useful and you end up in implementing a full custom framework in trying to tackle all the missing features. See More

Top Pro

Useful classes

Contains classes for managing requests, responses, cookies, logging, views, HTTP caching, and more. See More

Top Pro

Flexible

Slim doesn't demand that you stick to a fixed folder structure. As long as you load Slim the right way you can do anything from there the way you like it. See More

Top Pro

Extremely lightweight

Paired with swoole it's a micro service powerhouse. See More

Top Pro

Open source

The Slim Framework is open source and is released under the MIT public license See More

Top Pro

Extremely customizable

You can add any dependency, package or class that you want to use as a contained dependency. See More

Top Pro

Supports Php 5.3 and PHP 7

Top Pro

Makes it easy to understand the way some abstract functions and classes are built

In Django most things are abstracted, you just call some function or class without knowing how they were built, but with Slim, you end up understanding the way some abstract functions and classes are built. See More

Top Pro

Hooks for executing code at different points in its life-cycle

Slim supports code hooks for executing functions at different points in time during the application's lifecycle. See More

Specs

License:GPL 2

Written in:PHP

See All Experiences

557 72

score 118 · Answer 8

Yii

Top Pro

Rapid development through code scaffolding

Yii takes care of repetitive tasks through Gii, a web-based scaffolding tool. Gii takes care of code generation and creating code templates for: Models Controllers Forms Modules Extensions CRUD controller actions and views There are a lot of scaffolding templates made by community for Gii, that improve generated code functionality by a lot. Gii is very easy to extend yourself. See More

Top Con

Can be hard for beginners

Since Yii requires developers to write code following certain rules, or in other words, it requires developers to follow the "Yii way of doing things" it can be hard for beginners to warm up to it and start using it right away. See More

Top Pro

Comes with important security standarts

Since security is a crucial part of any application, Yii comes with great security features out of the box to help developers create a secure and reliable application. These security features contain but are not restricted to: Input validation Output filtering Features against SQL injection Cross-site scripting prevention See More

Top Con

Not very good at many to many relations

(but there is a good plugin, namely CAdvancedArBehavior extension to do this) See More

Top Pro

Highly extensible

Yii is built to be extremely extensible. Virtually every component of the framework can be extended programmatically. For example, if you want to add a unique id to your views, it's very easy to do: namespace app\components; class View extends yii\web\View { public $bodyId; /* Yii allows you to add magic getter methods by prefacing method names with "get" */ public function getBodyIdAttribute() { return ($this->bodyId != '') ? 'id="' . $this->bodyId . '"' : ''; } } See More

Top Pro

Integrated with a testing framework

Yii makes use of Codeception, a great PHP testing framework that helps developers run their tests. They can be unit, functional or acceptance tests since Codeception supports them all. See More

Top Pro

Lots of plugins available

Yii has about 2000 addons hosted on Yii's official website. These addons significantly decrease development time and increase the developer's efficiency. See More

Top Pro

License

Yii is free and open source and is distributed under the BSD License. See More

Top Pro

Strong community support

Yii has a strong and rather large community behind it. This is proven by the great number of blog posts, tutorials, guides and reviews on the Yii framework as well as the great number of extensions developed for it. See More

Top Pro

Easy to install

Yii uses Composer to handle it's dependency installation. This is rather easy and not very time consuming, although it should be noted that Composer is very resource-intensive considering what it's job is. But that is not really Yii's fault. See More

Top Pro

Best framework for CRUD operation

Yii Framework Provides most of features require for crud functionalities like GridView, Listview and DetailView (with jquery search and validation functions) by generating using GII. See More

Top Pro

Highly extensible without effort

Specs

PHP version:5.4+

Default Template Engine:Twig

Default ORM:Yii Active Record

See All Experiences

118 26

score 40 · Answer 9

CakePHP

Top Pro

Built-in ORM that's easy to use

Cake has a built-in ORM which is pretty easy to use and learn. Building queries can also be done very easily and fetching entire columns can be done in one or two lines of code. See More

Top Con

Slow

Because of legacy code, old concepts and prioritizing development speed over everything else, CakePHP is bloated and slow. See More

Top Pro

Fast development

Developing in CakePHP is very fast and flexible. CakePHP is about fast and reliable development, it achieves this by following the convention over configuration principle as it's heavily inspired by Rails (which follows the same programming paradigm). Convention over configuration is all about making it easier for the developer to start immediately writing code without worrying on what's going on "under the hood". See More

Top Pro

Large library of helper classes

CakePHP has a large library of helper classes with features such as: Authorization AJAX Forms E-mails Internationalization etc... See More

Top Pro

Exhaustive list of resources to learn CakePHP

Cake's great community has thrown together an exhaustive and amazing list of resources to get started with CakePHP. It's open source and can be found on GitHub. See More

Top Pro

Open Source

CakePHP open source and is licensed under the MIT license. See More

Specs

PHP version:5.4.16+

Default Template Engine:CakePHP Template

Default ORM:Default ORM included out of the box

See All Experiences

40 13

score 29 · Answer 10

Zend Framework

Top Pro

Well architected

Top Con

Loose documentation

Since Zend has a loosely-coupled architecture, it means that the documentation will be quite loose as well. Even though there's a lot of documentation for the framework, it's still hard to use it as a guideline to create a completed project. Although this can be less of a problem considering all the tutorials and guides out there. See More

Top Pro

Enterprise ready

Zend is the most used PHP framework by big businesses. Zend is widely used and tested by a large number of banks, as well as companies, such as Allied Beverage, BBC, Shaklee, CarinBridge, BNP Paribas and more. See More

Top Pro

Corporate backing

Partnered with Google, IBM, Adobe, Microsoft See More

Top Pro

Extended predefined classes

Zend has a large library of predefined classes with which developers can create maintainable and stable web applications. This is done if the developer works within the constraints and with the components of these different predefined classes, which makes the application more maintainable. See More

Top Pro

Wide database support

Zend supports almost all kinds of databases out there. From MySQL, IBM DB2, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server to PostgreSQL. See More

Top Pro

Allows customization

For developpers not used to Zend, they can use a predefined structure and use preloaded components and classes to build and maintain their application. But for advanced developpers, they can customize the structure to stick to their needs (or their likings) and extend primary Zend components for fine-tuned apps or replace the initial predefined Zend components by third parties components such as Doctrine ORM or another logging or templating framework. See More

Top Pro

Easy to build an API with Apigility

Apigility is a collection of Zend Framework modules. It's useful for building the API architecture of a web app quickly and painlessly by providing a flexible engine. Apigility also has a web-based UI that allows developers to quickly create and modify API services, configure authentication, set authorization rules, set up validation and write new documents. See More

Specs

PHP version:5.3+

Default Template Engine:Zend_View

Default ORM:No default, but an ORM can be installed.

See All Experiences

29 10

score 14 · Answer 11

Li3

Top Pro

Unified relational and non-relational database API

Lithium has unified the relational and non-relational database APIs into a single one. Being one of the few frameworks to do it. See More

Top Con

Less than ideal documentation

Documentation is scattered so it takes a little while to learn and figure some things out. See More

Top Pro

Robust plugin architecture

Lithium makes use of PHP namespaces to create a powerful plugin architecture. Almost every component of the framework is replaceable. See More

Top Pro

Fast Bootstrap & Autoloader

This framework loads faster than most due to its class autoloader. It is flexible as well and handles older classes - but requires the developer to define transforms here for naming convention, includes, etc. Many other frameworks use Composer for autoloading and that significantly slows down their bootstrap time because Composer's autoloader is extremely compatible without much developer interaction (it does not require as much involvement for autoloading legacy libraries). So it's a trade-off, speed vs. a little bit of up-front work. See More

Top Pro

Integrated unit testing

Lithium comes with integrated unit testing. It also has a test dashboard. See More

Top Pro

Aspect inspired filter system

Lithium's filter system is based on the paradigm of Aspect-oriented programming which aims to increase modularity by separating cross-cutting concerns and helping speed up development. See More

Top Pro

Great for building an API

Lithium can return JSON and many other formats from the same actions that render templates increasing productivity in many cases. It handles a "type" key in the route which allows it to render various responses with different Content-Types. This is incredibly useful and easy to extend. This combined with closures in routes makes Lithium a very good framework for building a RESTful API. See More

Specs

PHP version:5.3+

Default Template Engine:Custom Li3 engine

Default ORM:Default ORM included out of the box

See All Experiences

14 4

score 14 · Answer 12

FuelPHP

Top Pro

Total flexibility

Fuel has very few restrictions on how to write code. Classes and controllers can be in any file structure, any folder can be the "modules" folder and native classes can be extended any way you want. See More

Top Con

Small community

FuelPHP has a pretty small community compared to other alternatives. This means that there are not many resources and guides for it out there, but on the other hand, it's easier to get help from the core team of developers that are working on Fuel. See More

Top Pro

License

FuelPHP is open source and is released under the MIT license. See More

Top Pro

Out of the box HMVC structure

FuelPHP follows the HMVC pattern which makes it possible to divide the code into smaller modules. See More

Top Pro

Secure

Fuel takes security very serious, and as a result, has implemented the following measures to ensure the safety of your web applications: Output encoding in views CSRF protection XSS filtering Input filtering SQL injection See More

Top Pro

Powerful yet lightweight ORM

FuelPHP is all about being lightweight and simple, this is also demonstrated by it's built-in ORM, it's simple yet powerful. It maps a model to each table in the database, assigns fields on the table depending on the model configuration. See More

Specs

PHP version:5.3+

Default Template Engine:None

Default ORM:Default ORM included out of the box

See All Experiences

14 4

score 30 · Answer 13

Flight

Top Pro

Uses static methods

Since Flight uses static methods, it does not require for the application class to be instantiated. See More

Top Con

Cannot use ArrayAccess

The fact that it uses static methods means that it's impossible for Flight to make use of ArrayAccess, which in turns means that it cannot inject dependencies easily. See More

Top Pro

Open source

Flight is open source and is released under the MIT license. See More

Top Pro

Filters

A unique feature of Flight is something that the author calls filters. Filters are functions which can be executed before and after any other function and can change the parameters and the output of said function. This feature is used instead of hooks which in other frameworks are used to execute code into different parts of the application's life-cycle. See More

30 4

score 7 · Answer 14

Aura Framework

Top Con

LICENSE

Top Pro

High quality, well tested code

This framework has highly tested code. It is very reliable. In fact, most of its libraries have gone through scrutinizer-ci.com and they all score very high. See More

Top Con

Small community

Aura's community is still relatively small and it can be a little hard to find help or guides if you get stuck somewhere. See More

Top Pro

Loosely coupling allows for lots of flexibility

Aura is a loosely coupled collection of independent libraries with no base classes. This allow for extreme flexibility in choosing what libraries are needed. See More

7 1

score 22 · Answer 15

Silex

Top Pro

Built on top of Symfony components

The thing that makes Silex stand out from other PHP microframeworks is the fact that it's built using some of Symfony2's components. Making it quite powerful but still lightweight enough to be considered a true microframework. See More

Top Con

Documentation is not very extensive

The documentation for this framework is average, it's helpful mostly. But it is not extensive enough to cover everything in detail unfortunately. See More

Top Pro

Open source

Silex is open source and is licensed under the MIT license. See More

Top Pro

Simple and elegant DI container

Based on Pimple, Silex has a simple Dependency Injection container that consists of just one file and one class. See More

Top Pro

Testable

Silex makes use of Symfony2's HttpKernel which is used to abstract requests and responses. This in turn, makes it very easy to test apps created with the framework. See More

Top Pro

Extensible

By using Pimple, the Silex application extends the Pimple class, which in turn is nothing more than an implementation of the ArrayAccess interface that has been a part of PHP since version 5.0. This makes it possible to use an instance of the Application class as if it were an array. Like so: $app = new Silex\Application(); $app['config'] = new Config($config_path); This gives developers a great deal of flexibility when injecting dependencies and when testing. See More

22 9

score 11 · Answer 16

Kohana

Top Con

Poorly documented

Kohana has always been criticized for the poor documentation it has. Some things are not explained with details and some other things are not explained at all. See More

Top Pro

Lightweight

With no PECL extensions or PEAR libraries to increase it's bloat, Kohana is extremely lightweight and massive libraries are avoided for more consistency and speed. See More

Top Con

Deprecated PHP Framework

Top Pro

OOP framework that is extremely DRY

Kohana follows the OOP software paradigm and it strictly enforces the DRY principle, which makes it easier for developers to write clean and maintainable code. See More

Top Pro

Tools for quick development

Includes tools that help developers to make applications quickly and efficiently. Some of these tools include: Translation libraries Code profiling Form validation etc... See More

Top Pro

Open source

Kohana is open source and is released under the BSD license, this means that it can be modified even for commercial purposes. See More

Top Pro

Low RAM usage

It is as fast as any popular framework, but the RAM usage is really low in comparison. See More

Specs

PHP version:5.3.3+

Default Template Engine:KOstache

Default ORM:Default ORM included out of the box

See All Experiences

11 8

score 8 · Answer 17

Dropwizard

Top Pro

Enhanced productivity and less timewasting

The application can be run and debugged from the IDE without the need to recompile or redeploy the WAR file. This is because a Dropwizard web application creates on main program which starts the jetty container. See More

Top Con

Does not allow a lot a freedom of choice

Dropwizard removes a lot of freedom that the developer may have with other frameworks because of the fact that it tries to do everything itself. It chooses the best Java libraries for the job required, without allowing the developer much choice. See More

Top Pro

Application metrics integrated into the framework

Dropwizard comes with application metrics integrated out of the box. These metrics provide a lot of useful information such as request/response time. For example, to get the execution time of a method, the @Timed annotation is used. See More

Top Pro

Quick project bootstrap

Starting a project with Dropwizard si very easy and bootstraping is quick and painless. All that's needed is a single dependency added in the pom.xml file and it's ready to go. See More

8 0

score 46 · Answer 18

Bottle

Top Pro

Flexible

Being a small one file distribution it includes almost every vital thing you need to support little websites (routing, templating). Everything else can be implemented using plugins. See More

Top Con

Small community. Difficult to find online docs and examples

Top Pro

Single-file distribution

Bottle works around the one-file approach, everything is done in a bottle.py file. This means that it's extremely easy to share and upload your application since it practically is just one python file. See More

Top Con

Very hard to develop projects that are not smaller than 1000 lines

While Bottle is a great framework for building small applications (generally less than 1000 lines of code), it starts getting very hard to manage your application if you want to go even a bit larger than that. The fact that it follows a single-file distribution model and that it's missing something like Flask's blueprints only make this problem worse. See More

Top Pro

No need to install

It is so little there's no need to install, it is included in the standard libs python. See More

Top Pro

Async, *let friendly

Using it with gevent is a breeze. It's a WSGI app so it's easy to make it work with anything. See More

Top Pro

Truly magnificent

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46 2

score 48 · Answer 19

Pyramid

Top Pro

Very flexible

Pyramid can be used for creating small applications quickly and easily, but it also powers up large enterprise-scale applications such as Dropbox. See More

Top Con

The great number of options it offers can become intimidating

One of Pyramid's greatest drawbacks is that it requires a lot of set up in the beginning of a project. This can feel overwhelming and can keep people away from using it. See More

Top Pro

Persistence agnostic

Either NoSQL and SQL (including SQLAlchemy plugin). See More

Top Pro

Comes with security included

Includes authorization and authentication with multiple backends. See More

Specs

Written in:Python

Default Template Engine:Jinja2

Default ORM:SqlAlchemy

48 5

score 34 · Answer 20

Hapi

Top Pro

Backed by a major corporation

Hapi was developed and is still being used by Walmart. Being backed by such a major company means that it will not lose support any time soon and most importantly it's being developed by professionals and that you will always get support for it. See More

Top Con

Requires too much boilerplate

Hapi seems to be made with large applications in mind. The sheer amount of boilerplate code it requires is simply not practical for a small web app. This also means that there are few examples of Hapi applications around for beginners to learn from. See More

Top Pro

Consistency across applications

Hapi's philosophy is that configuration is more important than code. This is especially useful for very large teams because it helps developers maintain consistency and reusability throughout their code. See More

Specs

Platforms:Cross-platform

License:BSD-3-Clause

Written in:JavaScript

Repository:https://github.com/hapijs/hapi

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34 4