When comparing CakePHP vs Kohana, the Slant community recommends CakePHP for most people. In the question“What are the best PHP frameworks?” CakePHP is ranked 11th while Kohana is ranked 20th. The most important reason people chose CakePHP is:
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.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Built-in ORM that's easy to use
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.
Pro Fast development
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".
Pro Large library of helper classes
CakePHP has a large library of helper classes with features such as:
- Authorization
- AJAX
- Forms
- E-mails
- Internationalization
etc...
Pro Exhaustive list of resources to learn CakePHP
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.
Pro Open Source
CakePHP open source and is licensed under the MIT license.
Pro Lightweight
With no PECL extensions or PEAR libraries to increase it's bloat, Kohana is extremely lightweight and massive libraries are avoided for more consistency and speed.
Pro OOP framework that is extremely DRY
Kohana follows the OOP software paradigm and it strictly enforces the DRY principle, which makes it easier for developers to write clean and maintainable code.
Pro Tools for quick development
Includes tools that help developers to make applications quickly and efficiently. Some of these tools include:
- Translation libraries
- Code profiling
- Form validation
etc...
Pro Open source
Kohana is open source and is released under the BSD license, this means that it can be modified even for commercial purposes.
Pro Low RAM usage
It is as fast as any popular framework, but the RAM usage is really low in comparison.
Cons
Con Slow
Because of legacy code, old concepts and prioritizing development speed over everything else, CakePHP is bloated and slow.
Con Poorly documented
Kohana has always been criticized for the poor documentation it has. Some things are not explained with details and some other things are not explained at all.