Phalcon vs Zend Framework

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..

Zend is the most used PHP framework by big businesses. Zend is widely used and tested by a large number of banks, as well as companies, such as Allied Beverage, BBC, Shaklee, CarinBridge, BNP Paribas and more.

Partnered with Google, IBM, Adobe, Microsoft

Zend has a large library of predefined classes with which developers can create maintainable and stable web applications. This is done if the developer works within the constraints and with the components of these different predefined classes, which makes the application more maintainable.

Zend supports almost all kinds of databases out there. From MySQL, IBM DB2, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server to PostgreSQL.

For developpers not used to Zend, they can use a predefined structure and use preloaded components and classes to build and maintain their application. But for advanced developpers, they can customize the structure to stick to their needs (or their likings) and extend primary Zend components for fine-tuned apps or replace the initial predefined Zend components by third parties components such as Doctrine ORM or another logging or templating framework.

Apigility is a collection of Zend Framework modules. It's useful for building the API architecture of a web app quickly and painlessly by providing a flexible engine.

Apigility also has a web-based UI that allows developers to quickly create and modify API services, configure authentication, set authorization rules, set up validation and write new documents.