Overview

Laravel

Stacks28.7K

Followers23.7K

Votes3.9K

GitHub Stars82.6K

Forks24.6K

Symfony

Stacks8.5K

Followers6.2K

Votes1.1K

GitHub Stars30.7K

Forks9.7K

Phalcon

Stacks249

Followers294

Votes354

GitHub Stars10.8K

Forks2.0K

Laravel vs Phalcon vs Symfony: What are the differences?

# Introduction 
When choosing a PHP framework for web development, developers often compare Laravel, Phalcon, and Symfony. Each of these frameworks brings its own set of features and advantages to the table. Here, we will discuss the key differences between Laravel, Phalcon, and Symfony to help you make an informed decision.

1. **Architecture**: Laravel follows the MVC (Model-View-Controller) architecture, making it easy to separate logic and presentation layers. Phalcon, on the other hand, utilizes the HMVC (Hierarchical Model-View-Controller) architecture, allowing for better encapsulation of components. Symfony uses both MVC and HMVC patterns, offering developers flexibility in structuring their applications.

2. **Performance**: Phalcon is known for its exceptional performance due to its C-extension implementation, resulting in faster request handling and reduced overhead. Laravel and Symfony, while performance-optimized, may not match the speed of Phalcon due to its unique architecture.

3. **Learning Curve**: Laravel is renowned for its ease of use and beginner-friendly nature, making it a popular choice among developers of all skill levels. Symfony, although powerful, has a steeper learning curve and is better suited for experienced developers. Phalcon falls in between, providing a moderate learning curve with its unique architecture.

4. **Community Support**: Laravel boasts a large and active community, providing ample resources, tutorials, and packages for developers. Symfony also has a robust community with a strong focus on enterprise applications. Phalcon, being a relatively newer framework, has a smaller community but is steadily growing with dedicated users.

5. **Ecosystem**: Laravel offers a rich ecosystem with numerous built-in features and packages, simplifying development tasks. Symfony, known for its modularity, allows developers to pick and choose components based on project requirements. Phalcon, with its lightweight nature, provides a minimalist ecosystem tailored for high-performance applications.

6. **Documentation**: Laravel is known for its extensive and well-organized documentation, making it easy for developers to get started and troubleshoot issues. Symfony also offers comprehensive documentation, catering to developers of varying skill levels. Phalcon, while having adequate documentation, may require more research due to its unique architecture.

In Summary, Laravel, Phalcon, and Symfony each have their strengths and weaknesses, catering to different developer preferences and project requirements.

Advice on Laravel, Symfony, Phalcon

Eva

Fullstack developer

Jul 28, 2020

Needs adviceon

Java

Spring Boot

JavaScript

Hello, I am a fullstack web developer. I have been working for a company with Java/ Spring Boot and client-side JavaScript(mainly jQuery, some AngularJS) for the past 4 years. As I wish to now work as a freelancer, I am faced with a dilemma: which stack to choose given my current knowledge and the state of the market?

I've heard PHP is very popular in the freelance world. I don't know PHP. However, I'm sure it wouldn't be difficult to learn since it has many similarities with Java (OOP). It seems to me that Laravel has similarities with Spring Boot (it's MVC and OOP). Also, people say Laravel works well with Vue.js, which is my favorite JS framework.

On the other hand, I already know the Javascript language, and I like Vue.js, so I figure I could go the fullstack Javascript route with ExpressJS. However, I am not sure if these techs are ripe for freelancing (with regards to RAD, stability, reliability, security, costs, etc.) Is it true that Express is almost always used with MongoDB? Because my experience is mostly with SQL databases.

The projects I would like to work on are custom web applications/websites for small businesses. I have developed custom ERPs before and found that Java was a good fit, except for it taking a long time to develop. I cannot make a choice, and I am constantly switching between trying PHP and Node.js/Express. Any real-world advice would be welcome! I would love to find a stack that I enjoy while doing meaningful freelance coding.

826k views826k

Comments

washie

Developer at Bytecom

Jun 14, 2020

Decided

i find python quite resourceful. given the bulk of libraries that python has and the trends of the tech i find django which runs on python to be the framework of choice to the upcoming web services and application. Laravel on the other hand which is powered by PHP is also quite resourceful and great for startups and common web applications.

758k views758k

Comments

Mohammad

Oct 28, 2019

Needs adviceon

Node.js

Laravel

PHP

I want to create a video sharing service like Youtube, which users can use to upload and watch videos. I prefer to use Vue.js for front-end. What do you suggest for the back-end? Node.js or Laravel ( PHP ) I need a good performance with high speed, and the most important thing is the ability to handle user's requests if the site's traffic increases. I want to create an algorithm that users who watch others videos earn points (randomly but in clear context) If you have anything else to improve, please let me know. For eg: If you prefer React to Vue.js. Thanks in advance

309k views309k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Laravel	Symfony	Phalcon
It is a web application framework with expressive, elegant syntax. It attempts to take the pain out of development by easing common tasks used in the majority of web projects, such as authentication, routing, sessions, and caching.	It is written with speed and flexibility in mind. It allows developers to build better and easy to maintain websites with PHP..	Phalcon is a web framework implemented as a C extension offering high performance and lower resource consumption.
Template Engine; MVC Architecture Support; Eloquent ORM (Object Relational Mapping); Security; Artisan; Libraries & Modular; Database Migration System; Unit-Testing	-	-
Statistics
GitHub Stars 82.6K	GitHub Stars 30.7K	GitHub Stars 10.8K
GitHub Forks 24.6K	GitHub Forks 9.7K	GitHub Forks 2.0K
Stacks 28.7K	Stacks 8.5K	Stacks 249
Followers 23.7K	Followers 6.2K	Followers 294
Votes 3.9K	Votes 1.1K	Votes 354
Pros & Cons
Pros 555 Clean architecture 392 Growing community 370 Composer friendly 344 Open source 325 The only framework to consider for php Cons 54 PHP 33 Too many dependency 23 Slower than the other two 17 A lot of static method calls for convenience 15 Too many include	Pros 177 Open source 149 Php 130 Community 129 Dependency injection 122 Professional Cons 10 Too many dependency 8 Lot of config files 4 YMAL 3 Feature creep 1 Bloated	Pros 65 Fast 54 High performance 37 Open source 35 Fast and easy to use 32 Scalable Cons 4 Support few databases 2 Very bad documentation
Integrations
PHP Django CodeIgniter CakePHP	CakePHP PHP ReactPHP	PHP

What are some alternatives to Laravel, Symfony, Phalcon?

Node.js

Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices.

Rails

Rails is a web-application framework that includes everything needed to create database-backed web applications according to the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern.

Django

Django is a high-level Python Web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design.

.NET

.NET is a general purpose development platform. With .NET, you can use multiple languages, editors, and libraries to build native applications for web, mobile, desktop, gaming, and IoT for Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and more.

ASP.NET Core

A free and open-source web framework, and higher performance than ASP.NET, developed by Microsoft and the community. It is a modular framework that runs on both the full .NET Framework, on Windows, and the cross-platform .NET Core.

Spring

A key element of Spring is infrastructural support at the application level: Spring focuses on the "plumbing" of enterprise applications so that teams can focus on application-level business logic, without unnecessary ties to specific deployment environments.

Spring Boot

Spring Boot makes it easy to create stand-alone, production-grade Spring based Applications that you can "just run". We take an opinionated view of the Spring platform and third-party libraries so you can get started with minimum fuss. Most Spring Boot applications need very little Spring configuration.

Android SDK

Android provides a rich application framework that allows you to build innovative apps and games for mobile devices in a Java language environment.

Phoenix Framework

Phoenix is a framework for building HTML5 apps, API backends and distributed systems. Written in Elixir, you get beautiful syntax, productive tooling and a fast runtime.

MEAN

MEAN (Mongo, Express, Angular, Node) is a boilerplate that provides a nice starting point for MongoDB, Node.js, Express, and AngularJS based applications. It is designed to give you a quick and organized way to start developing MEAN based web apps with useful modules like Mongoose and Passport pre-bundled and configured.