When comparing Fat-Free Framework vs CodeIgniter, the Slant community recommends Fat-Free Framework for most people. In the question“What are the best PHP frameworks?” Fat-Free Framework is ranked 3rd while CodeIgniter is ranked 9th.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Simple development set up
Pro Lightweight without losing functionality
The framework is very lightweight and fast. Even though it's pretty light, it still does not lose a lot of functionality.
Pro Shortened development time
Building an application that processes a URL (display a page, submit a form, invoke Ajax, etc.) requires very little code and can be achieved very quickly. Allows developers to focus on the application itself and not the plumbing.
Pro Easy to get started
After you download the framework it is very simple to get an app up and running very quickly. Makes it easy for newer PHP and web app developers to start using a MVC framework.
Pro Very stable
You know those frameworks that have updated 5 times during your own development phase? Well, F3 sees one or two updates per year. Never had any issues updating or upgrading. F3 just works.
Pro ORM supports sql, nosql, and jig
Pro Highly modular
Virtually everything is modular. You can choose which modules and libraries to include and to keep the framework as lightweight as possible.
Pro FREE structure
Pro No canned coding/directory structure
Freedom to structure your projects' directories and codes as you wish.
F3 is a non-opinionated framework : you are entirely free to use the files/API/assets structure that you love.
Following a minimalistic approach, F3 tends to avoid adding code and structure that are not strictly necessary, while focusing on what really matters : coding your solution; actually you learn F3 while implementing/coding your project/webapp
Pro Multiple view engines
Default view engine is superb and can also work with varieties of PHP view engines including Twig.
Pro Vibrant community behind the framework
The community is responsive and helpful in clarifying the aspects of the framework.
Pro Very little spin up time
The time to go from knowing nothing about Fat-Free to getting a project completed is very reduced compared to other bulky frameworks.
Pro Comprehensive documentation and API reference
Concise and to the point documentation. Includes many examples and complete API reference.
Pro Unit testing toolkit
Pro No composer, curl or dependency injectors
You download a zip file and use it by placing require(); statement. No need to use composer, curl or any dependency injector which sometime become a great pain.
Pro Very little not included by default
In a framework that's so small, it puts the rest to shame.
Pro Self documenting code
Pro Good documentation
With many examples which are easy to follow by new users.
Pro Beginner-friendly
Setting up CodeIgniter is quick and easy. You can download the version you want from the CI homepage or directly pull the latest version from GitHub. After that, you unzip the contents to the directory that's required. The final step is to edit the config.php
to suit your needs and it's set up and ready for development.
There are also a lot of guides and tutorials from developers who have been using CI for a long time. This is because of the relative old age of the framework and the large community behind it.
Pro Lightweight
CodeIgniter has a small footprint, just 3MB and that's including the user guide.
Pro Well documented
The documentation is clear, structured and thorough. It explains both commonly used and CodeIgniter specific concepts and always with clear examples.
Pro Active community
Because it's relatively old and well-liked, it has an active community of developers behind it. It's used by a lot of websites in production.
Pro Open source
The MIT License (MIT)
CodeIgniter is open source and is distributed under the MIT license.
Pro Stable
CodeIgniter is tested by hundreds of thousand of developers that use it in production. This means that it's very hard for any bugs or problems to go unnoticed. Even when a new version is out, bugs are quickly found and patched up.
Pro Easy to use templating engine
CodeIgniter has it's own templating engine built-in. It's based on a mustache-like templating language which is easy to learn for new developers who have never seen it. While experienced developers will feel very comfortable using it.
Pro Output caching
CodeIgniter lets you cache the web pages in order to decrease loading times and increase efficiency and performance.
Pro CodeIgniter v4 is a complete rewrite
CI4 will be out soon & is a rewrite..
"CodeIgniter 4 is a rewrite of the framework and is not backwards compatible."
So it will support ALOT more newer functionality built-in.
Cons
Con Community is a bit small, so if you get stuck you have trouble finding answers via google
Searching for "fat-free minification" on google sometimes doesn't give you the "right" answer.
Con Backward incompatible within minor version
There are serious incompatibilities even between minor versions (eg. between 3.6.0 and 3.6.2). Developers exhibit complete lack of understanding what is versioning of product (and which changes should be integrated in which versions), which makes this framework unsuitable for serious work. Development is slow, stable versions are rare and not treated seriously.
Con Default ORM doesn't support joins
The default ORM for this framework is missing some features such as joins. But it's important to keep in mind that it's a small plugin, only 23KB in size which still can be replaced with a larger ORM if needed.
An alternative the drop in f3-cortex ORM which is popular, and supported by the community, which supports Joins and much more.
Con Need more example of working code and directory structures and usage with JS and CSS frameworks
Con Abandoned
The project has been abandoned since 2016. (not abandoned since 2019 with multiple new releases)
Con The default template engine is "home made"
Con Lack of video tutorials
While there is a great user guide, compared to other established PHP frameworks, there is a relative shortage of video and written step-by-step tutorials for newbies to learn this framework.
Con Outdated
CodeIgniter was first released during the times of PHP 4. This means that a lot of features that were added later to PHP are not available. Some of these features are:
- Support for namespaces
- Modular separation by default
- Procedural function helpers
While nowadays CodeIgniter can be used along the latest version of PHP, these features were not added so as not to mess with backward compatibility. They can still be used with CI, but it requires extending core files to make it work which is a waste of time and energy and requires advanced knowloedge of both PHP and CI.
Con No unit testing
Con It does not have basic functions
Some of the missing features include controller security, filters in forms and modoles, rules of validation, among others.