When comparing FuelPHP vs Lumen, the Slant community recommends FuelPHP for most people. In the question“What are the best PHP frameworks?” FuelPHP is ranked 15th while Lumen is ranked 17th. The most important reason people chose FuelPHP is:
Fuel has very few restrictions on how to write code. Classes and controllers can be in any file structure, any folder can be the "modules" folder and native classes can be extended any way you want.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Total flexibility
Fuel has very few restrictions on how to write code. Classes and controllers can be in any file structure, any folder can be the "modules" folder and native classes can be extended any way you want.
Pro License
FuelPHP is open source and is released under the MIT license.
Pro Out of the box HMVC structure
FuelPHP follows the HMVC pattern which makes it possible to divide the code into smaller modules.
Pro Secure
Fuel takes security very serious, and as a result, has implemented the following measures to ensure the safety of your web applications:
- Output encoding in views
- CSRF protection
- XSS filtering
- Input filtering
- SQL injection
Pro Powerful yet lightweight ORM
FuelPHP is all about being lightweight and simple, this is also demonstrated by it's built-in ORM, it's simple yet powerful. It maps a model to each table in the database, assigns fields on the table depending on the model configuration.
Pro Easily upgradable to Laravel
Since it's basically just a minimal version of Laravel, it can be upgraded to a full Laravel app if the need arises. No need for code changes, just import the code to a new Laravel install.
Pro Feature rich

Pro Highest performing PHP micro-Framework
Lumen is benchmarked at 100/rps (Requests Per Second) faster than Slim v3, which used to be considered the fastest and most performant micro-Framework to date with the ability to handle 1800/rps. (1900/rps vs 1800/rps respectively).
Pro Easy to use
Cons
Con Small community
FuelPHP has a pretty small community compared to other alternatives. This means that there are not many resources and guides for it out there, but on the other hand, it's easier to get help from the core team of developers that are working on Fuel.
Con Built for smaller tasks like APIs
Con It's based off Laravel and inherits its shortcomings
Lumen inherits many shortcomings of Laravel, such as static proxy classes.
Con Made to work alongside Laravel
Lumen as a framework is at it's full potential when used alongside it's older brother. Lumen was created to be used for microservices alongside Laravel, which is used for more user-facing applications. If a project is already using another framework other than Laravel, it would be better to use another microframework for microservices instead of Lumen.
