CakePHP vs CodeIgniter

Cake has a built-in ORM which is pretty easy to use and learn. Building queries can also be done very easily and fetching entire columns can be done in one or two lines of code.

Developing in CakePHP is very fast and flexible.

CakePHP is about fast and reliable development, it achieves this by following the convention over configuration principle as it's heavily inspired by Rails (which follows the same programming paradigm).

Convention over configuration is all about making it easier for the developer to start immediately writing code without worrying on what's going on "under the hood".

CakePHP has a large library of helper classes with features such as:

• Authorization
• AJAX
• Forms
• E-mails
• Internationalization
  etc...

Cake's great community has thrown together an exhaustive and amazing list of resources to get started with CakePHP. It's open source and can be found on GitHub.

CakePHP open source and is licensed under the MIT license.

Setting up CodeIgniter is quick and easy. You can download the version you want from the CI homepage or directly pull the latest version from GitHub. After that, you unzip the contents to the directory that's required. The final step is to edit the config.php to suit your needs and it's set up and ready for development.

There are also a lot of guides and tutorials from developers who have been using CI for a long time. This is because of the relative old age of the framework and the large community behind it.

CodeIgniter has a small footprint, just 3MB and that's including the user guide.

The documentation is clear, structured and thorough. It explains both commonly used and CodeIgniter specific concepts and always with clear examples.

Because it's relatively old and well-liked, it has an active community of developers behind it. It's used by a lot of websites in production.

The MIT License (MIT)

CodeIgniter is open source and is distributed under the MIT license.

CodeIgniter is tested by hundreds of thousand of developers that use it in production. This means that it's very hard for any bugs or problems to go unnoticed. Even when a new version is out, bugs are quickly found and patched up.

CodeIgniter has it's own templating engine built-in. It's based on a mustache-like templating language which is easy to learn for new developers who have never seen it. While experienced developers will feel very comfortable using it.

CodeIgniter lets you cache the web pages in order to decrease loading times and increase efficiency and performance.

CI4 will be out soon & is a rewrite..
"CodeIgniter 4 is a rewrite of the framework and is not backwards compatible."
So it will support ALOT more newer functionality built-in.