Falcon vs Lumen: What are the differences?

# Introduction
Falcon and Lumen are both lightweight PHP frameworks designed to create APIs and microservices efficiently. However, they have distinct differences that cater to different development needs.

# 1. **Performance**: Falcon is known for its high performance and low overhead due to being a bare-metal PHP framework, while Lumen is a micro-framework that sacrifices some performance for ease of use and simplicity.

# 2. **Flexibility**: Falcon provides full control over the architecture and components used, allowing developers to customize every aspect of the application. In contrast, Lumen comes with predefined structures and defaults, offering less flexibility in terms of configurations and modifications.

# 3. **Documentation**: Falcon's documentation is more extensive and detailed, providing in-depth resources for users to understand and utilize the framework's capabilities effectively. Lumen, on the other hand, offers concise and straightforward documentation, focusing more on practical examples rather than theoretical explanations.

# 4. **Community Support**: Falcon has a smaller community compared to Lumen, resulting in fewer third-party packages, resources, and community-driven extensions available for developers. Lumen, with its larger user base, offers more community support, plugins, and contributions to enhance the development experience.

# 5. **Learning Curve**: Falcon has a steeper learning curve due to its bare-metal approach, requiring developers to have a deeper understanding of PHP to utilize the framework efficiently. Lumen, being more user-friendly and beginner-oriented, has a lower learning curve, making it easier for novice developers to get started quickly.

# 6. **Compatibility**: Falcon is PHP 7.1 compatible and above, ensuring modern standards and features are supported, while Lumen is compatible with PHP 7.2 and above, allowing developers to leverage the latest PHP advancements and enhancements.

In Summary, Falcon excels in performance, flexibility, and control, while Lumen shines in simplicity, community support, and ease of use, catering to different developer preferences and project requirements.