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Add to SafariWhen comparing Slim vs Phalcon, the Slant community recommends Slim for most people. In the question“What are the best PHP frameworks?” Slim is ranked 1st while Phalcon is ranked 4th. The most important reason people chose Slim is:
Slim's documentation is well organized and detailed, every concept is thoroughly explained and it is very helpful for both advanced users and beginners.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Well organized and thorough documentation
Slim's documentation is well organized and detailed, every concept is thoroughly explained and it is very helpful for both advanced users and beginners.
Pro A good starting point
Slim is minimal and that is a good thing if you want to start from there. It can be easily extended and even supports popular packages that are used in Laravel (like Illuminate\Database (eloquent)) for example.
Pro REST based
REST fans will love the REST based architecture.
Pro Supports tie-ins for Rack-like middleware
Rack is an interface used in Ruby frameworks used to group and order modules, which most of the time are Ruby classes, and specify between them.
Slim uses a simple concept for it's middleware. By wrapping HTTP requests and responses it unifies the middleware into a single method call.
Pro Useful classes
Contains classes for managing requests, responses, cookies, logging, views, HTTP caching, and more.
Pro Flexible
Slim doesn't demand that you stick to a fixed folder structure. As long as you load Slim the right way you can do anything from there the way you like it.
Pro Extremely lightweight
Paired with swoole it's a micro service powerhouse.
Pro Open source
The Slim Framework is open source and is released under the MIT public license
Pro Extremely customizable
You can add any dependency, package or class that you want to use as a contained dependency.
Pro Supports Php 5.3 and PHP 7
Pro Makes it easy to understand the way some abstract functions and classes are built
In Django most things are abstracted, you just call some function or class without knowing how they were built, but with Slim, you end up understanding the way some abstract functions and classes are built.
Pro Hooks for executing code at different points in its life-cycle
Slim supports code hooks for executing functions at different points in time during the application's lifecycle.
Pro Extremely fast
Since the framework is and extension built in C it's extremely fast and efficient. It's actually one of the fastest PHP frameworks, and according to some benchmarks it's the fastest framework out there.
Pro Open source
Phalcon is open source and is available under the BSD License.
Pro Uses Volt template engine
The Volt template engine, which is embedded into Phalcon itself takes it's inspiration from the Jinja template engine and as such it's nice to look at, with a clear and understandable syntax.
Volt also compiles very fast, like Phalcon itself, so it avoids being a bottleneck for the framework's overall speed.
Pro Very flexible project structure
You can set up the base project as you want. It's very flexible
Pro Clean and light project code
Since the framework code is not in the project directory, the code is light and clean.
Pro Customizable with Zephir
Zephir is a high-level language designed to create PHP extensions easily by PHP programmers with no knowledge in C.
Zephir does this by compiling directly to C and then the C program is in turn compiled to be run as a PHP extension. This, coupled with the fact that Zephir's syntax is very similar to PHP makes it a perfect way for PHP developers to use it for customizing Phalcon.
Pro Loosely coupled components
Some components can be used as standalone packages like models, views, etc..
Cons
Con Very little consistency among different versions
There have been quite some changes that break the compatibility between Slim 2 and Slim 3. Even if you learned how to work with the Slim 2, you will find that Slim 3 requires re-training.
Con Dependency injection is too weak
It is not really dependency injection, but just a configurable container.
Con Needs strong bases to create dependencies
The dependency container schema of Slim is one of the biggest PROS and CONS of the framework. It is true that this schema brings so much flexibility to add anything, but another thing that is true is that you need to have strong bases of patterns, and an extensive knowledge of your libraries to convert it into a Slim dependency.
Con Too minimal
While it's true that Slim is a microframework, it's still too minimal. When used for throwaway projects or simple prototypes, it's perfect. But in the long run, it becomes less and less useful and you end up in implementing a full custom framework in trying to tackle all the missing features.
Con Not for shared hosting
Phalcon needs root access to install the PHP extension which is written in C. Developers who plan on using Phalcon must use VPS or Cloud Hosting with root access available.
Con Require good programming skills
Not so easy to use if you want to gain the best from it.
Con Debugging requires knowledge of C
You need to be a C programmer to debug Zephir or C code. Or if Phalcon is not maintained anymore and you have a problem and don't have much skills in C, you will be hard-pressed to find a C programmer to fix it.
