When comparing Falcon vs Lumen, the Slant community recommends Lumen for most people. In the question“What are the best web frameworks to create a web REST API?” Lumen is ranked 10th while Falcon is ranked 25th. The most important reason people chose Lumen is:
Since it's basically just a minimal version of Laravel, it can be upgraded to a full Laravel app if the need arises. No need for code changes, just import the code to a new Laravel install.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Built to build REST APIs
Falcon is designed entirely around building REST APIs. It achieves this helps a lot with it being lightweight and simple. It also helps developers take some design choices which would otherwise not be possible with a more general-purpose framework,
Pro Lightweight with minimal dependencies
Falcon is a very lightweight framework. This can be noticed simply by looking at the dependency list: other than the python standard library, six and mimeparse are the only dependencies.
Pro Performance is really awesome
Pro Easily upgradable to Laravel
Since it's basically just a minimal version of Laravel, it can be upgraded to a full Laravel app if the need arises. No need for code changes, just import the code to a new Laravel install.
Pro Feature rich

Pro Highest performing PHP micro-Framework
Lumen is benchmarked at 100/rps (Requests Per Second) faster than Slim v3, which used to be considered the fastest and most performant micro-Framework to date with the ability to handle 1800/rps. (1900/rps vs 1800/rps respectively).
Pro Easy to use
Cons
Con Limited in scope
Being designed around building REST APIs and the fact that it's minimalistic with very few dependencies makes Falcon opinionated (you should build a REST API) and limited in scope (you shouldn't be using Falcon to build a news site, blog or ecommerce platform).
Con Built for smaller tasks like APIs
Con It's based off Laravel and inherits its shortcomings
Lumen inherits many shortcomings of Laravel, such as static proxy classes.
Con Made to work alongside Laravel
Lumen as a framework is at it's full potential when used alongside it's older brother. Lumen was created to be used for microservices alongside Laravel, which is used for more user-facing applications. If a project is already using another framework other than Laravel, it would be better to use another microframework for microservices instead of Lumen.
