Symfony vs Fat-Free Framework

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.

The framework is very lightweight and fast. Even though it's pretty light, it still does not lose a lot of functionality.

Building an application that processes a URL (display a page, submit a form, invoke Ajax, etc.) requires very little code and can be achieved very quickly. Allows developers to focus on the application itself and not the plumbing.

After you download the framework it is very simple to get an app up and running very quickly. Makes it easy for newer PHP and web app developers to start using a MVC framework.

You know those frameworks that have updated 5 times during your own development phase? Well, F3 sees one or two updates per year. Never had any issues updating or upgrading. F3 just works.

Virtually everything is modular. You can choose which modules and libraries to include and to keep the framework as lightweight as possible.

Freedom to structure your projects' directories and codes as you wish.

F3 is a non-opinionated framework : you are entirely free to use the files/API/assets structure that you love.

Following a minimalistic approach, F3 tends to avoid adding code and structure that are not strictly necessary, while focusing on what really matters : coding your solution; actually you learn F3 while implementing/coding your project/webapp

Default view engine is superb and can also work with varieties of PHP view engines including Twig.

The community is responsive and helpful in clarifying the aspects of the framework.

The time to go from knowing nothing about Fat-Free to getting a project completed is very reduced compared to other bulky frameworks.

Concise and to the point documentation. Includes many examples and complete API reference.

You download a zip file and use it by placing require(); statement. No need to use composer, curl or any dependency injector which sometime become a great pain.

In a framework that's so small, it puts the rest to shame.

With many examples which are easy to follow by new users.