Grails vs Symfony

Grails is an abstraction over Spring and Hibernate. This makes Grails applications fast and scalable. This is because both Spring and Hibernate are themselves scalable.

Grails is a full-stack web framework, not just MVC. It contains a lot of stuff out of the box, but it doesn’t enforce it. It contains over 900 plugins which provide a Groovy API for a lot of useful and well-known Java libraries. And what is more important is that they are super easy to install!

Setting up a new project is quite fast and code generation (scaffolding) saves you a lot of time. It also uses a convention over configuration principle which helps you bypass all the configuration trouble.

Grails also comes with a reloading mechanism out of the box.

Grails is designed to be a rapid development framework with a straight learning curve. It advocates convention over configuration. Extensibility is very simple when using plugins (there is a lot of them). One command in the console – and all the dependencies and configurations are managed for you.

Do you need something advanced in the UI? You can either create it in GSP with an addon of CSS/JavaScript or you can find a plugin that will do the work for you. Plugins include integration with Bootstrap, jQuery, Yeoman and much more.

The Documentation section is actually a wiki, which can be modified by any logged in user. It has an official manual, tutorials, screencasts, a sample app and much more. If that does not do it for you, then there are countless third-party tutorials, more than 12k questions on SO and much much more

Symfony is open source and released under the MIT license.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.