CodeIgniter vs Slim
When comparing CodeIgniter vs Slim, the Slant community recommends Slim for most people. In the question“What are the best PHP frameworks?” Slim is ranked 1st while CodeIgniter is ranked 9th. The most important reason people chose Slim is:
Slim's documentation is well organized and detailed, every concept is thoroughly explained and it is very helpful for both advanced users and beginners.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Beginner-friendly
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.
Pro Lightweight
CodeIgniter has a small footprint, just 3MB and that's including the user guide.
Pro Well documented
The documentation is clear, structured and thorough. It explains both commonly used and CodeIgniter specific concepts and always with clear examples.
Pro Active community
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.
Pro Open source
The MIT License (MIT)
CodeIgniter is open source and is distributed under the MIT license.
Pro Stable
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.
Pro Easy to use templating engine
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.
Pro Output caching
CodeIgniter lets you cache the web pages in order to decrease loading times and increase efficiency and performance.
Pro CodeIgniter v4 is a complete rewrite
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.
Pro Well organized and thorough documentation
Slim's documentation is well organized and detailed, every concept is thoroughly explained and it is very helpful for both advanced users and beginners.
Pro A good starting point
Slim is minimal and that is a good thing if you want to start from there. It can be easily extended and even supports popular packages that are used in Laravel (like Illuminate\Database (eloquent)) for example.
Pro REST based
REST fans will love the REST based architecture.
Pro Supports tie-ins for Rack-like middleware
Rack is an interface used in Ruby frameworks used to group and order modules, which most of the time are Ruby classes, and specify between them.
Slim uses a simple concept for it's middleware. By wrapping HTTP requests and responses it unifies the middleware into a single method call.
Pro Useful classes
Contains classes for managing requests, responses, cookies, logging, views, HTTP caching, and more.
Pro Flexible
Slim doesn't demand that you stick to a fixed folder structure. As long as you load Slim the right way you can do anything from there the way you like it.
Pro Extremely lightweight
Paired with swoole it's a micro service powerhouse.
Pro Open source
The Slim Framework is open source and is released under the MIT public license
Pro Extremely customizable
You can add any dependency, package or class that you want to use as a contained dependency.
Pro Supports Php 5.3 and PHP 7
Pro Makes it easy to understand the way some abstract functions and classes are built
In Django most things are abstracted, you just call some function or class without knowing how they were built, but with Slim, you end up understanding the way some abstract functions and classes are built.
Pro Hooks for executing code at different points in its life-cycle
Slim supports code hooks for executing functions at different points in time during the application's lifecycle.
Cons
Con Outdated
CodeIgniter was first released during the times of PHP 4. This means that a lot of features that were added later to PHP are not available. Some of these features are:
- Support for namespaces
- Modular separation by default
- Procedural function helpers
While nowadays CodeIgniter can be used along the latest version of PHP, these features were not added so as not to mess with backward compatibility. They can still be used with CI, but it requires extending core files to make it work which is a waste of time and energy and requires advanced knowloedge of both PHP and CI.
Con No unit testing
Con It does not have basic functions
Some of the missing features include controller security, filters in forms and modoles, rules of validation, among others.
Con Very little consistency among different versions
There have been quite some changes that break the compatibility between Slim 2 and Slim 3. Even if you learned how to work with the Slim 2, you will find that Slim 3 requires re-training.
Con Dependency injection is too weak
It is not really dependency injection, but just a configurable container.
Con Needs strong bases to create dependencies
The dependency container schema of Slim is one of the biggest PROS and CONS of the framework. It is true that this schema brings so much flexibility to add anything, but another thing that is true is that you need to have strong bases of patterns, and an extensive knowledge of your libraries to convert it into a Slim dependency.
Con Too minimal
While it's true that Slim is a microframework, it's still too minimal. When used for throwaway projects or simple prototypes, it's perfect. But in the long run, it becomes less and less useful and you end up in implementing a full custom framework in trying to tackle all the missing features.