When comparing PHP vs Mint, the Slant community recommends Mint for most people. In the question“What are the best languages that compile to JavaScript? ” Mint is ranked 39th while PHP is ranked 40th. The most important reason people chose Mint is:
Mint can handle banking accounts, saving accounts, credit cards, etc. It consolidates all your accounts together so you do not need to put work into following multiple accounts.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro One of the most common languages
According to the 2015 Stack Overflow Developer Survey (26,086 people surveyed), PHP was the 5th most popular/used language at 29.7%.
Pro Lots of tutorials online
Pro Used by most common CMS platforms
Many clients are looking for an easy-to-update web site that's flexible and free. Drupal and Wordpress fill those needs very well.
Pro Most prominent language for web applications
Part of the de facto standard web application stack.
Pro Great third-party package manager
PHP standard library is somewhat subpar, but if you need plugins, language features, composer has them all( you can even puzzle together a custom framework from composer).
Pro Fast
Since 7.x was released, PHP has become a pretty fast language.
Pro Lots of PHP frameworks available which help with development
PHP people love frameworks, and with frameworks such as Laravel, you can build a web app or API really fast (Facades, ORMs, scaffolding etc.)
Pro Great documentation
Pro All accounts in one place
Mint can handle banking accounts, saving accounts, credit cards, etc. It consolidates all your accounts together so you do not need to put work into following multiple accounts.
Pro Organizes budget into categories
Mint splits your spending into different categories, such as gas or fast food, so you can see where you're spending too much money or how much you need to budget for.
Pro Alerts
Mint can be set to alert you to various events such as upcoming bills, or low balances on any accounts. It can be set to alert you from the app, through email or by text message. In addition you can sign up to recieve monthly emails about your money and ways to improve your budget.
Cons
Con Poorly designed language
Despite its widespread use, PHP is generally looked upon poorly from a design point of view. The consistency of function names and function argument order, lazily and borderline non-functional implementation of object oriented programming, can only receive requests via POST methods, slow version adoption (the PHP you learn right now may not work on every webserver you'll work on), and a focus on "hacking things together" rather than "doing it right". These are all very common complaints when it comes to working with PHP. While not a bad language to learn, PHP is not at all a good language to learn first, as it will probably teach bad habits.
Con Immense catalog of insecure frameworks
The most serious security problems in websites on the web today are almost universally found in popular PHP frameworks, CMS platforms, libraries and code samples, almost all stemming from poor language design, bad tutorials and awful resources.
Con After python, probably one of the worst languages ever
Con Poorly designed language, awful syntax & luckily on the decline
Nobody in their right mind is using PHP for new software, if you decide to learn it as your first language you'll be stuck working in teams with old developers who have had no interest in the computer programming field since they landed their first job while maintaining some 2000 era archaic website codebase.
Con Most tutorials are out of date
A lot of very bad tutorials are still widely circulated among beginners, and these tutorials teach very poor programming practices.
Con Most resources are poorly-written
Few resources exemplify the "correct" or secure use of features.
Con Interpreter being too permissive
If you forget the dollar sign, the variable name will be converted to a string.
Con Not international
Only works for US & Canada banks, and even then there are banks (like EQ Bank) that have actively blocked access to Mint.
Con Online only
It does not work offline.
Con Unsafe
With very few exceptions, Mint isn't just syncing your data over, but is using your username and password to log directly into the bank website. Banks will not reimburse for any fraud or stolen funds that may result from this, or may use Mint as an excuse to not reimburse for charges or stolen funds that occur from other causes.
Con Categories organization not flexible
Con The budgeting part has too many bugs
Con Very complicated tool
Of course, it's powerful but also very complicated. Some would prefer tools which are less robust, has less features but are a lot easier.