When comparing Lumen vs Leaf, the Slant community recommends Leaf for most people. In the question“What are the best PHP frameworks?” Leaf is ranked 13th while Lumen is ranked 17th. The most important reason people chose Leaf is:
Leaf has a simple structure and easy code.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Easily upgradable to Laravel
Since it's basically just a minimal version of Laravel, it can be upgraded to a full Laravel app if the need arises. No need for code changes, just import the code to a new Laravel install.
Pro Feature rich
Pro Highest performing PHP micro-Framework
Lumen is benchmarked at 100/rps (Requests Per Second) faster than Slim v3, which used to be considered the fastest and most performant micro-Framework to date with the ability to handle 1800/rps. (1900/rps vs 1800/rps respectively).
Pro Easy to use
Pro Simple structure
Leaf has a simple structure and easy code.
Pro Useful classes
Contains classes for managing requests, responses, cookies, logging, views, HTTP caching, and more.
Pro Beautiful, well organised documentation
Pro REST-based
Cons
Con Built for smaller tasks like APIs
Con It's based off Laravel and inherits its shortcomings
Lumen inherits many shortcomings of Laravel, such as static proxy classes.
Con Made to work alongside Laravel
Lumen as a framework is at it's full potential when used alongside it's older brother. Lumen was created to be used for microservices alongside Laravel, which is used for more user-facing applications. If a project is already using another framework other than Laravel, it would be better to use another microframework for microservices instead of Lumen.
Con Lack of a database layer
Has inbuilt connection methods for only mysqli and pdo.