When comparing Bottle vs Symfony, the Slant community recommends Bottle for most people. In the question“What are the best backend web frameworks?” Bottle is ranked 20th while Symfony is ranked 25th. The most important reason people chose Bottle is:
Being a small one file distribution it includes almost every vital thing you need to support little websites (routing, templating). Everything else can be implemented using plugins.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Flexible
Being a small one file distribution it includes almost every vital thing you need to support little websites (routing, templating). Everything else can be implemented using plugins.
Pro Single-file distribution
Bottle works around the one-file approach, everything is done in a bottle.py
file. This means that it's extremely easy to share and upload your application since it practically is just one python file.
Pro No need to install
It is so little there's no need to install, it is included in the standard libs python.
Pro Async, *let friendly
Using it with gevent is a breeze. It's a WSGI app so it's easy to make it work with anything.
Pro Truly magnificent
Pro Open Source
Symfony is open source and released under the MIT license.
Pro Easy debugging with a built-in debug toolbar
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.
Pro Great plugin ecosystem
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.
Pro Highly active community
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.
Pro Teaches you good practices
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.
Pro Uses YAML/XML/PHP/Annotation
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.
Pro Powerful event system
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.
Pro Great templating engine
Uses Twig, which is a simple and easy to learn templating language that can also be used as a standalone engine, outside the framework.
Pro Uses Doctrine ORM
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.
Cons
Con Small community. Difficult to find online docs and examples
Con Very hard to develop projects that are not smaller than 1000 lines
While Bottle is a great framework for building small applications (generally less than 1000 lines of code), it starts getting very hard to manage your application if you want to go even a bit larger than that.
The fact that it follows a single-file distribution model and that it's missing something like Flask's blueprints only make this problem worse.
Con Settings
Too many configurations.
Con Very hard to install
Setting it up on webhost without a console is difficult.
Con Promotes bad development practices
Such as annotations via comments.
Con Doctrine ORM
Symfony Standard Edition, which is the most widely used distribution, comes integrated with Doctrine, the most resource hogging ORM library.
Con You need a lot of files to display a single page
For a simple hello world page you need about 5 files.