Add to Chrome
Add to Edge
Add to Firefox
Add to Opera
Add to Brave
Add to SafariWhen comparing Symfony vs Laravel 5, the Slant community recommends Laravel 5 for most people. In the question“What are the best backend web frameworks?” Laravel 5 is ranked 8th while Symfony is ranked 25th. The most important reason people chose Laravel 5 is:
With migrations, powerful and intuitive Eloquent CRUD, resource routing, and simple JSON response out of the box, a complete REST API can be written in hours.
Specs
Question 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 Good for building RESTful APIs
With migrations, powerful and intuitive Eloquent CRUD, resource routing, and simple JSON response out of the box, a complete REST API can be written in hours.
Pro Comes with an excellent built-in ORM
Laravel's Eloquent ORM is a simple and fast Object-Relational Mapping which helps with organizing the application's database. It supports the most popular databases (MySQL, Postgres, SQLite, etc.) out of the box.
Pro Good documentation
Laravel's documentation is thorough and very good. It covers everything and is very helpful to experienced and new users alike.
Pro Handles event queuing
Laravel supports event queuing and it does so in a very simple way. To create an event that should be queued just run:
php artisan handler:event SendPurchaseConfirmation --event=PodcastWasPurchased --queued
This creates a handler that implements the Illuminate\Contracts\Queue\ShouldBeQueued interface. Now when this handler is called it will automatically be queued by the event dispatcher.
Pro Comes with its own CLI
Laravel comes out of the box with it's own CLI called Artisan. With Artisan developers can do several different tasks such as migrating databases, seeding databases, clearing the cache and much much more.
Pro Easy to write web apps with authentication
Laravel comes with Authentication capabilities and a fully-powered Auth class out of the box. For passwords it uses bcrypt.
Pro Easy to learn
Pro Gives developers a great degree of freedom in how they set up their project structure
Laravel allows for free configuration and does not force developers to use a single project structure, instead they can change it to how they wish.
Pro Can use Symfony components
Laravel uses many libraries built for the Symfony PHP framework. Many of these libraries are well-built and have been tested by users before. Since the point of using a web framework is to shorten development time and to avoid reinventing the wheel for problems that have already been solved, then it's logical for a framework to use libraries already built to solve problems that have already been solved.
Pro Extremely powerful template system
Laravel has a powerful template system called Blade. It's quite similar to Twig or Moustache with lots of curly braces but the real power comes from the usage of PHP code directly in the view. Blade templates compile directly to raw PHP and are processed in the server when a request is made.
Pro Gulp tasks in the form of Laravel Elixir
In Laravel 5.0 they added Laravel Elixir, which provides an API for using Gulp tasks for Laravel applications. Elixir supports several CSS preprocessors and even some test tools. But it's still in the early stages of development and it will be developed even further in the following releases. With more methods and more Gulp tasks supported.
Pro Great Ecosystem
Has a great Ecosystem with SAAS like: Forge, Envoyer, Nova & from 3rd parties like oh-dear
Pro Great Community
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 Uses too much magic methods
It complicates debugging and autocompletion.
Con Bloated
While the speed doesn't seem to be an issue with it (on local tests), in production it may be hindered. The framework creates a ton of files and folders, some of which your app might not even use. Not good if you don't like having a ton of folders and rigid non-standard PHP folder structure for development.
Con Hard to use model properties
You need to check all model properties in database to know it exists, or declare all them manually.
Con Steep learning curve
While a lot of times you can write things in plain PHP, it will hinder you down the line when you want to use core features and find that you have to rewrite code which then causes issues throughout the app. Documentation is good, but you need to know what you are looking for and practical examples are non-existent. Many features have been updated throughout the versions in such a short time that tutorials you find online are confusing to sort through outdated tutorials and guides that no longer work or have been depreciated.
Con Poor performance
Con Follows bad design practices
Uses bad practices, like Singletons, Magic models, Middleware.
