When comparing Symfony vs Beego, the Slant community recommends Beego for most people. In the question“What are the best backend web frameworks?” Beego is ranked 18th while Symfony is ranked 25th. The most important reason people chose Beego is:
Beego is a "batteries included" web framework, which means that a lot of features already come out of the box. This way you don't have to spend time and find third-party libraries to integrate to the framework for most of the tasks you need to complete.
Specs
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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 No need to find and install external libraries
Beego is a "batteries included" web framework, which means that a lot of features already come out of the box. This way you don't have to spend time and find third-party libraries to integrate to the framework for most of the tasks you need to complete.
Pro Built-in tool which watches for changes
Beego has a built-in tool which watches the code for changes. This tool (called bee tool) can be configured to run any task once the code changes. It can run tests or reload and rebuild the whole project.
Pro Built in ORM
Beego's eloquent ORM is a simple and fast Object-Relational Mapping which helps with organizing the application's database. Beego examples and documentation all use the beego ORM. No need to learn to use and integrate another ORMs API.
Pro Captcha
Pro Auto testing
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 Very opinionated
Con Very opinionated
Con Non-idiomatic code
Con Builds may fail silently
Sometimes even though a build has failed, the pages will still render. Apparently it caches a previous build when the current one has a problem. This can be a frustrating though because it leaves you wondering why the page you are working on stopped working out of the blue.