When comparing Zend Framework vs Symfony, the Slant community recommends Symfony for most people. In the question“What are the best PHP frameworks?” Symfony is ranked 5th while Zend Framework is ranked 18th. The most important reason people chose Symfony is:
Symfony is open source and released under the MIT license.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Well architected
Pro Enterprise ready
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.
Pro Corporate backing
Partnered with Google, IBM, Adobe, Microsoft
Pro Extended predefined classes
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.
Pro Wide database support
Zend supports almost all kinds of databases out there. From MySQL, IBM DB2, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server to PostgreSQL.
Pro Allows customization
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.
Pro Easy to build an API with Apigility
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.
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 Loose documentation
Since Zend has a loosely-coupled architecture, it means that the documentation will be quite loose as well. Even though there's a lot of documentation for the framework, it's still hard to use it as a guideline to create a completed project. Although this can be less of a problem considering all the tutorials and guides out there.
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.