When comparing Symfony vs Spark, the Slant community recommends Symfony for most people. In the question“What are the best backend web frameworks?” Symfony is ranked 25th while Spark is ranked 41st. The most important reason people chose Symfony is:
Symfony is open source and released under the MIT license.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Open Source
Symfony is open source and released under the MIT license.
Pro Easy debugging with a built-in debug toolbar
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.
Pro Great plugin ecosystem
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.
Pro Highly active community
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.
Pro Teaches you good practices
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.
Pro Uses YAML/XML/PHP/Annotation
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.
Pro Powerful event system
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.
Pro Great templating engine
Uses Twig, which is a simple and easy to learn templating language that can also be used as a standalone engine, outside the framework.
Pro Uses Doctrine ORM
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.
Pro Custom quick swipe features
Pro Free
Pro Robust customization options
Pro Syncs across devices
Pro Unified inbox
Pro Free snooze options
Cons
Con Settings
Too many configurations.
Con Very hard to install
Setting it up on webhost without a console is difficult.
Con Promotes bad development practices
Such as annotations via comments.
Con Doctrine ORM
Symfony Standard Edition, which is the most widely used distribution, comes integrated with Doctrine, the most resource hogging ORM library.
Con You need a lot of files to display a single page
For a simple hello world page you need about 5 files.
Con Horrible privacy policy
- Sends statistical data to several services known for bad privacy policies (Google, Facebook), also there's no way to opt out.
- Automatically creates an acount with the first address entered and subscribes you to their newsletter.
- Stores credentials for your email accounts on their servers.
- Stores your emails on their servers to push them to your devices.
- Server infrastructure seems to be located in the US.
Con Doesn't support many services
Many services such as Spam filters, Pocket, and other apps are not supported.
Con Doesn't show the counts of emails next to the folders
- On the Mac platform will show +999 for the folder that contains more than 1000 emails.
- On the iPhone, the platform will not show the counts next to the folder unless they are new emails.