Play Framework vs Yii

It's like Java, but more Haskell-y.

Play has quite a large community which provides numerous tutorials and videos related to developing with Play.
The Play official documentation covers many things, such as the framework itself but also specific stuff such as Akka, SBT and Netty.

There are also many big companies that base their main sites around Play, one of them is LinkedIn which provides third-party documentation on a regular basis.

Play uses Akka for concurrency, Scala for a templating engine, Netty as a client-server framework and SBT (Simple Build Tool) for building. And they all come out of the box.
Play also comes with the option to scaffold your applications. Play is an all-embracing ecosystem designed to increase developer productivity and shorten development times.

Play is very simple to get started. The documentation is very helpful for beginners and advanced users alike and the official website has a great "Getting Started" tutorial to begin developing with Play.

Play framework's convention over configuration methodology makes most Play projects have a very similar structure. This means that the code written for the framework is very readable. This enables a developer to switch between applications without having to relearn the ecosystem for every project. The built-in templating system also helps with code and makes it possible to have a very low count of lines of code.

Java is one of the most widely known languages, so people coming from that background can jump right in and not have to learn a new language syntax.

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.

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

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 . '"' : '';
    }

}

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.