Play Framework vs Phalcon

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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