CakePHP vs Symfony

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.

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.