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Add to SafariWhen comparing Foundation vs Symfony, the Slant community recommends Foundation for most people. In the question“What are the best web design tools?” Foundation is ranked 11th while Symfony is ranked 15th. The most important reason people chose Foundation is:
Foundation allows designing for multiple screen sizes simultaneously easily, meaning your content will always fit.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Responsive design philosophy
Foundation allows designing for multiple screen sizes simultaneously easily, meaning your content will always fit.
Pro Uses REMs instead of pixels
Foundation uses REMs instead of pixels, meaning you don't have to state an explicit height, width, padding, etc, for every device. Simply put, using REMs means you can just state font-size: 80%; and have the whole component (and its nested elements) shrink by 20%.
This is great for making your site mobile friendly. There is also a Sass function in Zurb that converts pixels to REMs so if you're used to thinking in pixels, you don't have to learn a different system.
Pro No style lock-in
Styles are purposefully undeveloped to encourage differentiation between different sites using Foundation.
Pro Block grid
Foundation has a feature called block grid. Block grid gives designers the power to divide the contents of an unordered list into a grid that is evenly spaced. Furthermore, Foundation also takes care of collapsing columns as well as removing gutters.
Pro Easy customization
Just by looking at the name, Foundation merely provides designers with a foundation of sorts on which they can build their design. It can be customized easily through SASS, a powerful CSS pre-processor or by overriding the default CSS styles.
Pro Easily extensible with a selection of add-ons
There's a variety of front-end templates, icon fonts, responsive table examples, SVG icons and stencils that help you quick-start or easily improve on your site.
Pro Support for off-canvas navigation
Foundation comes with an easy way of creating off-canvas menus.
Pro Uses Interchange to load responsive content
Foundation comes with Interchange, it makes use of media queries to load images responsively and create content that's suited to different browsers and devices.
Pro RTL support
Allows easily changing text direction.
<html class="no-js" lang="ar" dir="rtl">Pro Built-in form validation
Foundation comes with Abide plugin, an HTML5 form validation library.
Pro Good mobile support
Foundation was one of the first frameworks to adopt a mobile-first philosophy. By focusing on mobile design first, Foundation makes designers think on what kind of content is important, relevant and interesting to the users without thinking too much on the space.
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.
Cons
Con Can be hard for beginners to grasp
Since Foundation is built to be customizable, it's default style may not be very appealing for most. While it's true that most production-ready websites shouldn't be using the default style of a css framework (they would all end up looking the same), this is even more true for Foundation.
Con Needs more pre-built components
Example would be a scroll-spy not only for one cell, but cell to cell.
Con Not UMD pattern in core
This problem will bring attention when used with Angular, React and other JS framework. It is important to know that they create app version of this framework.
Con Documentation is a bit better than average
Documentation could be written better and clearer, with many more example than they currently have. Sometimes hard to find solutions for detailed css problems.
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.
