Phalcon vs Revel

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.

Phalcon is open source and is available under the BSD License.

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.

You can set up the base project as you want. It's very flexible

Since the framework code is not in the project directory, the code is light and clean.

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.

Some components can be used as standalone packages like models, views, etc..

Revel comes bundled with a code reload tool which rebuilds the project on every file change. This code reload tool is also used to run, build and deploy the Revel application that you are building.

Revel 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.