What are the best PHP frameworks for building a RESTful API?

Question

8

Options
Considered

193

User
Recs.

Dec 26, 2020

Last
Updated

Here’s the Deal

The Best 1 of 8 OptionsWhy?

Best PHP frameworks for building a RESTful API	Price	PHP version	Default Template Engine
93 Slim	-	-	-
89 Lumen	-	7.1.3	-
84 Laravel	-	7.2.0	Blade
-- Symfony 4	free	7.1+	Twig
-- Silex	-	-	-

See Full List

7 Other Options Considered

Lumen

Top Con

Inadequate or non-existent doc

Documentation for Lumen is the worst. If it exists, it's probably the wrong version or inadequately covered in the Laravel doc instead. What doc that is there is sparse to the point of useless. You're going to have to love "iterative development" b/c you'll be trying an infinite number of possibilities just to get basic stuff to work. See More

Top Pro

Most Performant 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

Specs

PHP version:7.1.3

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

It's faster than Slim 3 and Sirex

According to Lumen's internal benchmarks, it is 10% faster than Slim 3 and 50% faster than Sirex (requests per second). See More

Top Pro

Easy to use

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

See All

Laravel

Top Pro

Easy to learn

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

Specs

PHP version:7.2.0

Default Template Engine:Blade

License:MIT License

Initial Release:June 2011

See All Specs

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

Uses too much magic methods

It complicates debugging and autocompletion. 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

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

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

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 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 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 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

See All

Silex

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

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

Slow performance rendering it difficult to scale

Silex is only able to perform half the number of requests per second as Lumen. 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

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

See All

Fat-Free Framework

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

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

Specs

PHP version:5.4+

Default Template Engine:custom

Top Pro

No canned coding/directory structure

Freedom to structure your projects' directories and codes as you wish. 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

See All

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Slim

Top Pro

REST based

REST fans will love the REST based architecture. 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

CooperativePirwa's Experience

3 years with Slim. 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

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

BrightEupraxia's Experience

well its slim, suitable for data centric transactions inherent in rest api's, loosely coupled internals and plug-able architecture (dependency injection), great community and resources See More

Top Pro

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

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

Top Con

Lack of learning resources for Slim 3

There are very few tutorials and learning resources for Slim 3. See More

Top Pro

Extremely lightweight

Paired with swoole it's a micro service powerhouse. 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 fully custom framework in trying to tackle all the missing features. So in the end, if the project would go further than a prototyping stage it would be easier to just implement another microframework that has those missing features out of the box. See More

Top Pro

Open source

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

Top Pro

Very easy to perform CRUD operations

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

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

Low learning curve

You can literally have your first application up in less than an hour. See More

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 Pro

Great scalability

Install only the packages you need, and even build large applications around this super clean architecture. No stacks of libraries you don't need and no verbose configuration files and setup routines. See More

Top Pro

Useful classes

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

See All

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The Best 1 of 8 OptionsWhy?

My Recommendation for Slim

My Recommendation for Slim

REST based

Very little consistency among different versions

A good starting point

Needs strong bases to create dependencies

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

Lack of learning resources for Slim 3

Extremely lightweight

Too minimal

Open source

Very easy to perform CRUD operations

Extremely customizable

Flexible

Low learning curve

Well organized and thorough documentation

Great scalability

Useful classes

Supports tie-ins for Rack-like middleware

7 Other Options Considered

My Recommendation for Lumen

My Recommendation for Lumen

Inadequate or non-existent doc

Most Performant PHP micro-Framework

Made to work alongside Laravel

It's faster than Slim 3 and Sirex

Easy to use

Easily upgradable to Laravel

My Recommendation for Laravel

My Recommendation for Laravel

Easy to learn

Hard to use model properties

Handles event queuing

Uses too much magic methods

Extremely powerful template system

Can use Symfony components

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

Good documentation

Comes with an excellent built-in ORM

Comes with its own CLI

Good for building RESTful APIs

My Recommendation for Symfony 4

My Recommendation for Symfony 4

Fast response

Hard to learn

My Recommendation for Silex

My Recommendation for Silex

Documentation is not very extensive

Built on top of Symfony components

Slow performance rendering it difficult to scale

Simple and elegant DI container

Extensible

My Recommendation for Leaf

My Recommendation for Leaf

REST-based

Simple structure

Useful classes

Beautiful, well organised documentation

My Recommendation for Fat-Free Framework

My Recommendation for Fat-Free Framework

Highly modular

Default ORM doesn't support joins

No canned coding/directory structure

Lightweight without losing functionality

My Recommendation for LaunchGator

My Recommendation for LaunchGator

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