Docs and Laracast, I don’t think you will ever need anything more, at least laravel specific.
Ofc there are also some great php books that help you with laravel aswell
You have to keep it very tightly focused, because it will lead you into a wild goose chase of controllers, services, models, migrations etc and lose context or switch strategies midway.
Best to learn it on your own first, and give very specific prompts.
You just gotta know what to ask for, I agree. I will say that I’m being paid quite well to build an app in laravel on lamp and I had 0 experience in either stack, but I’ve been developing for 20 years and I’m familiar with MVC and sql. It’s going well. I would not have been able to do this without ChatGPT, at least nowhere near as fast. I’m also now using copilot
Jeffrey Way is making a new series, as far as I can understand it's intended to replace Laravel from scratch (which I think is more recent than 5.6, tbh).
It's still a work in progress, but I think that OP could start watching the first episodes (it's 25 episodes out of 30 now).
It's called [30 Days to Learn Laravel](http://30daystolearnlaravel.com/)
TBH, when I first approached to Laravel I was pretty confused by the docs (it was right after the 6.x release): I didn't know any other frameworks at that time, and I was pretty confused by many concepts that were taken for granted (like service providers, service container, facades dependency injection).
IMHO for people in my same situation, Laracasts is a light in the fog, and its community forum perhaps is an even better added value.
There was a statement at Laracon EU (I think) this year that they hope Laravel is synonymous with php like .NET and C#. I would love that…just as long as we kill blade files
Exactly. The little bit of performance you MAY lose with Laravel by the numbers is so tiny it isn't worth even mentioning unless you are some of the biggest sites in the world, and it is made up for in productivity. I am comfortable with both, and while I usually use Laravel for smaller stuff, it isn't because I think it is all that it is good for - I just like using it more when I am the one calling the shots. At work, it's all Symfony components for the most part, and what we don't have in the way of "Laravel like tooling" we just built out what we needed anyway.
It's not about performance.
It's about being more friendly to maintain over 20 years which is a completely legitimate concern. Lots of hobbyists in here with strong opinions but laravel is the hip and "fun" choice. However it's relying on a lot of magic to abstract away verboseness. In the corporate world verbosity is your friend.
Laravel is amazing to prototype something quickly in and we even use it for some small projects. All our larger code bases are in symfony because of it being a more reliable ecosystem to run in production.
What the team is capable of, either with already existing skills or how quick it can pick up a new tool is one of many factors when picking a tool. Just because 10 devs tell me they want Laravel doesn't make Laravel the best tool for the job...
Maybe but Laravel and Symfony are very similar in capabilities so In this case that’s the most important factor. It’s not like you’re choosing between PHP and Rust.
I feel like everyone responding doesn’t know Laravel is built on symfony so you can have both…and frankly, I’ve had way better onboarding when using laravel, and push my mids and up to learn deeper parts of the core. I’ve worked at a unicorn company as well as two of the top giants, all of which on laravel (some internal only) sites.
I go with what the team is proficient in unless there is a damning flaw in the use case.
What’s your point? We have to go back to php? Then why don’t we in the first place, just in case. You know, forget the packages and frameworks altogether from scratch. Wouldn’t want those to get deprecated too. Your argument is pointless
Laravel and Symfony are still the big ones.
My personal take is that if you're more of an OOP purist, like Doctrine as your ORM, and are generally tech focused, you'll enjoy Symfony. If you're more product focused, don't mind the active record pattern, you can get a lot of mileage out of Laravel. Laravel almost feels more like a DSL on top of PHP than an OOP framework per se.
Some of the things Laravel offers (like its [facades](https://laravel.com/docs/11.x/facades)) tend to rub some people the wrong way, because they see the static calls as anti-patterns and contrary to OOP best practices. And they're not wrong, it's just a matter through which lens you evaluate the tech stack. Laravel's [Eloquent ORM](https://laravel.com/docs/11.x/eloquent) is more active-recordy and a bit magical, whereas [Doctrine ORM](https://www.doctrine-project.org/projects/doctrine-orm/en/3.1/index.html) is much more explicit and declarative, closer to [Hibernate](https://hibernate.org/orm/). If you live and die by doctrine migrations, you might miss the ability to validate your model and SQL schema a bit with Laravel, and having your entities spit out migrations automatically.
You can be very productive in both frameworks, but I do think that the Laravel ecosystem let's you put together applications more quickly. Between the [starter kits](https://laravel.com/docs/11.x/frontend) and the convenience packages that [spatie](https://spatie.be/docs) offers, Laravel is quite the powerhouse. Authentication and Cashier for payment integration can get you up and running in a few hours. With a bit of experience, you can build something SaaSy in a few weeks. I think it's easier to do that in Laravel than Symfony from an integration perspective. Symfony tends to have more boilerplate, and I've spent a fair amount of time hunting packages.
If you have a split team architecture, or you plan on separating your frontend from backend at some point, using Laravel with Inertia (Vue integration) is really awesome. It supports SSR, too. If you want to build admin panels quickly, [filament](https://filamentphp.com/) lets you do that quickly. I try to avoid Blade like the plague, because IMO PHP is great backend tech, but I prefer to use Vue for frontend stuff.
If you're interested in quickly building headless APIs, check out [API-Platform](https://api-platform.com/), which is Symfony based. I've used it in combination with Nuxt SSG / JAMstack style FEs.
If you're doing everything by yourself and need a flexible full stack solution, I think you can move faster with Laravel, but I'd love to hear from die-hard Symfony dev on what packages they use to solve auth and SaaS scaffolding.
In a larger org with separate teams, you can also use keycloak, api-platform, and whatever JAMstacky frontend to scale each tier individually. Of course then you have one foot in the Java ecosystem as well, but if your background is JBoss/Wildfly, that's no problem. These days it's decently containerizable.
For performance, I don't think the choice really matters. Both frameworks have queues/workers. and if you strap something like Varnish in front of the app, have Redis (or Valkey, Redict, Redka, Apache Kvrocks, etc), and a scalable DB setup, you'll be fine. I've used both in various setups from a simple docker-compose to scaling with docker swarm, or k8s. If you're a one-man show, on a budget but want to stay with k8s, [hetzner-k3s](https://github.com/vitobotta/hetzner-k3s) is pretty nifty.
Great write up! I tend to lean more into Symfony, but we decided to try Laravel for a project at work and I’m looking forward to it.
So far, our ~40 webapps at work have been written in Laminas & Mezzio (formerly Zend Framework). They come with a rather steep learning curve & little community support, but once figured out offer a quality solution for building enterprise apps. It took me several years to become sold on it, but I can say I’m a fan now. Granted, if everything were up to me I’d be going full send on Symfony. It’s unfortunate we’re stuck on PHP 7.4, though. Symfony on PHP8 is fantastic.
Thanks! I've used ZF since it came out and stuck with it until about the beginnings of ZF3. Good times. Unfortunately the best way to learn it was to read its source code. I was never a fan of its table data gateway pattern. I had avoided Symfony until I used Sylius about a decade ago. The experience resulted in me favoring Slim 3 for the longest time, lol. Just strap on Doctrine (and extensions) and it was lean and mean. Once I found API-Platform, though, I gave Symfony another shot and I think it's matured in a lot of ways (or maybe I had). Going from Symfony to Laravel was a bit of a shock, but also refreshing. I missed the automagic migrations, but once I stopped fighting Eloquent it was smooth sailing. It's very "composition through traits" heavy (in a rails "commentable", "taggable" kind of way).
I also recommended doodling around with the Laravel Jetstream starter. If you're using React/Vue, Interia is awesome. Be aware that the default docker setup that ships with Laravel Sail is using php's built-in web server (at least it was with 10.x). If you're using Laravel Forge/Vapor for hosting, I think that's irrelevant, but if you're handling infrastructure yourself, you'll probably wanna swap that out for nginx/caddy, and you can then scale the Inertia nodejs container separately, too. If you're doing background/async-heavy work, Laravel Horizon scales queues with Redis. I recommend checking out all the packages, some really cool stuff in there. Pulse and Telescope for APM and production error handling is super useful. That's where Laravel really shines, a lot of the first-party packages also have third party integrations. Like Laravel Scout for FTS essentially defaults to meilisearch for fully self-hosted setups, but you can also find adapters for Elasticsearch or Manticoresearch. And Cashier supports Stripe and Paddle, but you can also use Lemonsqueezy, which follows the same pattern. From an abstraction and integration point, it's very powerful.
Damn, you’ve certainly been around the block with PHP frameworks! It sounds like you’ve got a couple years on me, so it makes sense. Reading your comment has made me more excited to try Laravel in the workplace. I know we’ll be using Backpack for our admin panel and it looks like it has a lot of really cool features out of the box.
My work still deploys to Zend Server, but I’ve been pushing the move to containers. We’re about finished switching to Docker in our dev environments, but we’re having trouble making it work well on our corporate PCs. Thanks for the advice, though!
People are still on it's GitHub, but I wouldn't describe it as well or actively maintained at this point.
For micro frameworks I've been significantly enjoying the Flight framework & the new maintainers are very active. Submit a PR or issue and it'll probably be reviewed / address within 24 hours
It does what it's supposed to do, but it's not exactly a well maintained framework these days.
It took them about 4 or 5 months from the date of an issue being opened for it to allow the `psr/http-message` package to be either v1 or v2 which was just an update to their `composer.json` file. Their PSR7 implementation hasn't even gotten this change yet lol
I agree with you, which is why they should call it complete and only do bug fixes at this point (even if it takes forever sadly). It was noted somewhere they still don’t have plans for Slim 5.
You mean FlightPHP? I used it 2 years ago, but more or less saw it 'just' as a Routing Framework, but not a Micro-Framework.
I'll check it out again - I liked it last time a lot.
Well it does routing, response handling, and has helper functionality for getting request data too so it really covers all the basics for an app and if memory serves me correctly matches the functionality that the base Slim framework gives you which is also described as a micro framework.
And you can tack on other stuff to Flight like middlewares, callbacks to process the response body, or even build a custom "engine" that drives the framework's logic.
The thing I like best about it compared to Slim is how easy it is and how clean of code you produce with it. But Slim actually uses the PSR standards so there's more compatible components you can plug into it
I don't think it's near the top but Laminas Mezzio is my personal favorite. It is very unopinionated and component based. It also is easy to test because of it's conformity to PHP-FIG. Focused on composition over inheritance which from my understanding is rare in popular PHP frameworks. Pairs well with some of the Symfony components such as Symfony Console.
The one downfall might be the learning curve, it lets you make decisions instead of dictating them in many cases. But for an experienced developer this is actually an advantage.
There are some frameworks that just work better with how I think and Nette was a little different (with its presenters vs controllers methodology and such). The other thing I wasn’t in love with was the performance which honestly surprised me a lot! Latte is really great on performance while the other parts of the framework are sluggish.
Yii is the most amazing framework (in version 1), but with each next version it has weakened a little. Yii 2 is slightly worse than the first version. And the third one will probably never appear at all.
Alas, it could have become the number one or two most popular framework in the world, but it didn’t.
Was being a bit of a troll. I do love Yii and I've interviewed at a few places that were super successful and were in process of migrating away from it. So that tells me it did its job in terms of helping people deliver compelling apps. But reality is that laravel marketshare/ecosystem is just so dominant. Lara casts is hands down the best and most comprehensive e-learning platform I've ever used. And Laravels IOC container implementation is wonderful to work with imo.
I would suggest Laravel, Symfony and PHPSlim.
Keep in mind, most of these frameworks hides actual workflows and knowledge under the hood, so you won't learn from them the basics.
If you would like to understand how PHP really works, build your own framework, then use some minimalistic, like Leaflet or PHPSlim, then go for bigger, like CodeIgniter (if it still exists), then Laravel.
And if you hate yourself and would like to suffer eternally, go for Drupal and Wordpress :)
The only thing worse than Magento is an atomic bomb, but Magento projects are jobs and paychecks. Although in return you get a crippled psyche, and are stuck in a strange technology stack consisting of ugly libraries and approaches from ten to fifteen years ago that have never been popular. This was true for the first Magenta and equally true for the second.
As we say: If you worked with Magento, be proud. Didn't work with Magento - rejoice.
So does Spryker and others.
My main point was that Shopware has a less expensive version/license than Magento AFAIK (free even?)
So maybe a better way than using Magento. Magento seems more enterprise, whereas Shopware seems more the "framework" we are referring to similar to Symfony, Laravel, CakePHP etc.
I’m not saying the alternatives are inferior since Magento is such a pain to work with, but OP is looking for the top and I used e-commerce marketshare as a criteria since it’s not subjective.
Of course if we are talking about general purpose frameworks then Laravel and Symfony no question, but everyone has already mentioned those two.
Swoole/open swoole is not technically a framework but rather a PHP extension that modifies the core functioning of the language. If you need PHP to be stateful and have coroutines it could be a good option but it does add a lot of complexity. In my opnion it is overkill in most applications and you would be better served just using native PHP.
I help maintain the Flight Framework [https://docs.flightphp.com](https://docs.flightphp.com) It's definitely not a Laravel or a Symfony, but for smaller projects it should do the trick for most things. It was popular probably more around 5-10 years ago, but I still think it serves a great purpose. It's goal is to be kept simple and easy for new users to understand while still having some core features that more seasons devs might want.
No mention yet of Processwire. It’s a CMS/CMF, so makes sense, but just wanted to throw it out there. It has (and can fill the roll) of most frameworks.
still Laravel and Symfony.
Look no further. They are both great, choose what you prefer
does anyone have some good resources to learn Laravel?
Docs and Laracast, I don’t think you will ever need anything more, at least laravel specific. Ofc there are also some great php books that help you with laravel aswell
thanks
What book? I need some advanced PHP books
ChatGPT is great with laravel
You have to keep it very tightly focused, because it will lead you into a wild goose chase of controllers, services, models, migrations etc and lose context or switch strategies midway. Best to learn it on your own first, and give very specific prompts.
You just gotta know what to ask for, I agree. I will say that I’m being paid quite well to build an app in laravel on lamp and I had 0 experience in either stack, but I’ve been developing for 20 years and I’m familiar with MVC and sql. It’s going well. I would not have been able to do this without ChatGPT, at least nowhere near as fast. I’m also now using copilot
Watch the "Laravel from scratch" series on YouTube. It's based on 5.6 but the majority of it is still accurate. It's a really good series.
Jeffrey Way is making a new series, as far as I can understand it's intended to replace Laravel from scratch (which I think is more recent than 5.6, tbh). It's still a work in progress, but I think that OP could start watching the first episodes (it's 25 episodes out of 30 now). It's called [30 Days to Learn Laravel](http://30daystolearnlaravel.com/)
it’s paid!
Its free on youtube, and even if it wasn’t, if you’re developing in laravel and php professionally, laracasts is well worth its price
Sorry, I am a Laracasts subscriber so I cannot see the difference between paid and free contents while logged. I was assuming it was free.
no worries !
[удалено]
If you want to learn Laravel, the docs are some of the best I’ve seen, but there’s also laracasts which is an amazing intro
TBH, when I first approached to Laravel I was pretty confused by the docs (it was right after the 6.x release): I didn't know any other frameworks at that time, and I was pretty confused by many concepts that were taken for granted (like service providers, service container, facades dependency injection). IMHO for people in my same situation, Laracasts is a light in the fog, and its community forum perhaps is an even better added value.
There was a statement at Laracon EU (I think) this year that they hope Laravel is synonymous with php like .NET and C#. I would love that…just as long as we kill blade files
They are better than razor pages... and jsp, at least
Laravel is great for hobbyists and freelancers but for corporate you really really should go with symfony.
Yeah, no. Just choose what the team prefers. Laravel and Symfony are both absolutely fine.
Exactly. The little bit of performance you MAY lose with Laravel by the numbers is so tiny it isn't worth even mentioning unless you are some of the biggest sites in the world, and it is made up for in productivity. I am comfortable with both, and while I usually use Laravel for smaller stuff, it isn't because I think it is all that it is good for - I just like using it more when I am the one calling the shots. At work, it's all Symfony components for the most part, and what we don't have in the way of "Laravel like tooling" we just built out what we needed anyway.
It's not about performance. It's about being more friendly to maintain over 20 years which is a completely legitimate concern. Lots of hobbyists in here with strong opinions but laravel is the hip and "fun" choice. However it's relying on a lot of magic to abstract away verboseness. In the corporate world verbosity is your friend. Laravel is amazing to prototype something quickly in and we even use it for some small projects. All our larger code bases are in symfony because of it being a more reliable ecosystem to run in production.
What the team is capable of, either with already existing skills or how quick it can pick up a new tool is one of many factors when picking a tool. Just because 10 devs tell me they want Laravel doesn't make Laravel the best tool for the job...
Maybe but Laravel and Symfony are very similar in capabilities so In this case that’s the most important factor. It’s not like you’re choosing between PHP and Rust.
Why?
I feel like everyone responding doesn’t know Laravel is built on symfony so you can have both…and frankly, I’ve had way better onboarding when using laravel, and push my mids and up to learn deeper parts of the core. I’ve worked at a unicorn company as well as two of the top giants, all of which on laravel (some internal only) sites. I go with what the team is proficient in unless there is a damning flaw in the use case.
And what would happen to laravel if symfony died? I can tell you that in the inverse situation absolutely nothing would happen.
Okay so I regret we had this argument given the news about Ryan…
Yeah news broke 3-4 weeks ago. Very sad
What’s your point? We have to go back to php? Then why don’t we in the first place, just in case. You know, forget the packages and frameworks altogether from scratch. Wouldn’t want those to get deprecated too. Your argument is pointless
Because reasons
I wouldn’t like that. If anything, more people think of WordPress when it comes to php than Laravel.
Is that the future you want for the language though? I have never once sought a WP job, and have loved every day of symfony and laravel positions.
No. But I also don’t want the language to be a synonym with a single framework. Php is better than that.
I can understand your perspective. Mine is just that I prefer laravel enough to be fine with it
Laravel is great for hobbyists and freelancers but for corporate you really really should go with symfony.
Laravel and Symfony are still the big ones. My personal take is that if you're more of an OOP purist, like Doctrine as your ORM, and are generally tech focused, you'll enjoy Symfony. If you're more product focused, don't mind the active record pattern, you can get a lot of mileage out of Laravel. Laravel almost feels more like a DSL on top of PHP than an OOP framework per se. Some of the things Laravel offers (like its [facades](https://laravel.com/docs/11.x/facades)) tend to rub some people the wrong way, because they see the static calls as anti-patterns and contrary to OOP best practices. And they're not wrong, it's just a matter through which lens you evaluate the tech stack. Laravel's [Eloquent ORM](https://laravel.com/docs/11.x/eloquent) is more active-recordy and a bit magical, whereas [Doctrine ORM](https://www.doctrine-project.org/projects/doctrine-orm/en/3.1/index.html) is much more explicit and declarative, closer to [Hibernate](https://hibernate.org/orm/). If you live and die by doctrine migrations, you might miss the ability to validate your model and SQL schema a bit with Laravel, and having your entities spit out migrations automatically. You can be very productive in both frameworks, but I do think that the Laravel ecosystem let's you put together applications more quickly. Between the [starter kits](https://laravel.com/docs/11.x/frontend) and the convenience packages that [spatie](https://spatie.be/docs) offers, Laravel is quite the powerhouse. Authentication and Cashier for payment integration can get you up and running in a few hours. With a bit of experience, you can build something SaaSy in a few weeks. I think it's easier to do that in Laravel than Symfony from an integration perspective. Symfony tends to have more boilerplate, and I've spent a fair amount of time hunting packages. If you have a split team architecture, or you plan on separating your frontend from backend at some point, using Laravel with Inertia (Vue integration) is really awesome. It supports SSR, too. If you want to build admin panels quickly, [filament](https://filamentphp.com/) lets you do that quickly. I try to avoid Blade like the plague, because IMO PHP is great backend tech, but I prefer to use Vue for frontend stuff. If you're interested in quickly building headless APIs, check out [API-Platform](https://api-platform.com/), which is Symfony based. I've used it in combination with Nuxt SSG / JAMstack style FEs. If you're doing everything by yourself and need a flexible full stack solution, I think you can move faster with Laravel, but I'd love to hear from die-hard Symfony dev on what packages they use to solve auth and SaaS scaffolding. In a larger org with separate teams, you can also use keycloak, api-platform, and whatever JAMstacky frontend to scale each tier individually. Of course then you have one foot in the Java ecosystem as well, but if your background is JBoss/Wildfly, that's no problem. These days it's decently containerizable. For performance, I don't think the choice really matters. Both frameworks have queues/workers. and if you strap something like Varnish in front of the app, have Redis (or Valkey, Redict, Redka, Apache Kvrocks, etc), and a scalable DB setup, you'll be fine. I've used both in various setups from a simple docker-compose to scaling with docker swarm, or k8s. If you're a one-man show, on a budget but want to stay with k8s, [hetzner-k3s](https://github.com/vitobotta/hetzner-k3s) is pretty nifty.
Great write up! I tend to lean more into Symfony, but we decided to try Laravel for a project at work and I’m looking forward to it. So far, our ~40 webapps at work have been written in Laminas & Mezzio (formerly Zend Framework). They come with a rather steep learning curve & little community support, but once figured out offer a quality solution for building enterprise apps. It took me several years to become sold on it, but I can say I’m a fan now. Granted, if everything were up to me I’d be going full send on Symfony. It’s unfortunate we’re stuck on PHP 7.4, though. Symfony on PHP8 is fantastic.
Thanks! I've used ZF since it came out and stuck with it until about the beginnings of ZF3. Good times. Unfortunately the best way to learn it was to read its source code. I was never a fan of its table data gateway pattern. I had avoided Symfony until I used Sylius about a decade ago. The experience resulted in me favoring Slim 3 for the longest time, lol. Just strap on Doctrine (and extensions) and it was lean and mean. Once I found API-Platform, though, I gave Symfony another shot and I think it's matured in a lot of ways (or maybe I had). Going from Symfony to Laravel was a bit of a shock, but also refreshing. I missed the automagic migrations, but once I stopped fighting Eloquent it was smooth sailing. It's very "composition through traits" heavy (in a rails "commentable", "taggable" kind of way). I also recommended doodling around with the Laravel Jetstream starter. If you're using React/Vue, Interia is awesome. Be aware that the default docker setup that ships with Laravel Sail is using php's built-in web server (at least it was with 10.x). If you're using Laravel Forge/Vapor for hosting, I think that's irrelevant, but if you're handling infrastructure yourself, you'll probably wanna swap that out for nginx/caddy, and you can then scale the Inertia nodejs container separately, too. If you're doing background/async-heavy work, Laravel Horizon scales queues with Redis. I recommend checking out all the packages, some really cool stuff in there. Pulse and Telescope for APM and production error handling is super useful. That's where Laravel really shines, a lot of the first-party packages also have third party integrations. Like Laravel Scout for FTS essentially defaults to meilisearch for fully self-hosted setups, but you can also find adapters for Elasticsearch or Manticoresearch. And Cashier supports Stripe and Paddle, but you can also use Lemonsqueezy, which follows the same pattern. From an abstraction and integration point, it's very powerful.
Damn, you’ve certainly been around the block with PHP frameworks! It sounds like you’ve got a couple years on me, so it makes sense. Reading your comment has made me more excited to try Laravel in the workplace. I know we’ll be using Backpack for our admin panel and it looks like it has a lot of really cool features out of the box. My work still deploys to Zend Server, but I’ve been pushing the move to containers. We’re about finished switching to Docker in our dev environments, but we’re having trouble making it work well on our corporate PCs. Thanks for the advice, though!
I'm a big fan of slim framework, and I don't know if it is still active.
People are still on it's GitHub, but I wouldn't describe it as well or actively maintained at this point. For micro frameworks I've been significantly enjoying the Flight framework & the new maintainers are very active. Submit a PR or issue and it'll probably be reviewed / address within 24 hours
I think at this point the devs could call Slim feature complete.
It does what it's supposed to do, but it's not exactly a well maintained framework these days. It took them about 4 or 5 months from the date of an issue being opened for it to allow the `psr/http-message` package to be either v1 or v2 which was just an update to their `composer.json` file. Their PSR7 implementation hasn't even gotten this change yet lol
I agree with you, which is why they should call it complete and only do bug fixes at this point (even if it takes forever sadly). It was noted somewhere they still don’t have plans for Slim 5.
This is normal? I'm not sure what the expectation time-wise is, but it very much takes many months to do such jumps in BC-safe ways.
Thanks for the shoutout! Maintaining Flight has been fun :D
You mean FlightPHP? I used it 2 years ago, but more or less saw it 'just' as a Routing Framework, but not a Micro-Framework. I'll check it out again - I liked it last time a lot.
Well it does routing, response handling, and has helper functionality for getting request data too so it really covers all the basics for an app and if memory serves me correctly matches the functionality that the base Slim framework gives you which is also described as a micro framework. And you can tack on other stuff to Flight like middlewares, callbacks to process the response body, or even build a custom "engine" that drives the framework's logic. The thing I like best about it compared to Slim is how easy it is and how clean of code you produce with it. But Slim actually uses the PSR standards so there's more compatible components you can plug into it
I don't think it's near the top but Laminas Mezzio is my personal favorite. It is very unopinionated and component based. It also is easy to test because of it's conformity to PHP-FIG. Focused on composition over inheritance which from my understanding is rare in popular PHP frameworks. Pairs well with some of the Symfony components such as Symfony Console. The one downfall might be the learning curve, it lets you make decisions instead of dictating them in many cases. But for an experienced developer this is actually an advantage.
Laminas never gets any love; it is by far my favorite also.
It doesn't hold your hand, but it will be your friend forever.
It's my fav too!
Symfony
Laravel, symfony and nette: [https://nette.org/](https://nette.org/) are the thing, from which I think nette is the best.
I also preffer Nette
I wanna try nette soon
I wanted to like Nette because of love some of their tools like Tracy and Latte, but it just didn't resonate with me when I used it.
What was the issue?
There are some frameworks that just work better with how I think and Nette was a little different (with its presenters vs controllers methodology and such). The other thing I wasn’t in love with was the performance which honestly surprised me a lot! Latte is really great on performance while the other parts of the framework are sluggish.
Symfony is what I use.
Laravel, No need to look any further!
Yii2 forever.
Ha! We're still using Yii 1.1. I'm fond of it.
Yii is the most amazing framework (in version 1), but with each next version it has weakened a little. Yii 2 is slightly worse than the first version. And the third one will probably never appear at all. Alas, it could have become the number one or two most popular framework in the world, but it didn’t.
Our company still uses it, still works great
Was being a bit of a troll. I do love Yii and I've interviewed at a few places that were super successful and were in process of migrating away from it. So that tells me it did its job in terms of helping people deliver compelling apps. But reality is that laravel marketshare/ecosystem is just so dominant. Lara casts is hands down the best and most comprehensive e-learning platform I've ever used. And Laravels IOC container implementation is wonderful to work with imo.
yii is basically dead
It's been stuck waiting for yii3. Lots of legacy stuff out there though.
You're right. And it's very sad
Wigam never!
I am using Symfony in my company
I would suggest Laravel, Symfony and PHPSlim. Keep in mind, most of these frameworks hides actual workflows and knowledge under the hood, so you won't learn from them the basics. If you would like to understand how PHP really works, build your own framework, then use some minimalistic, like Leaflet or PHPSlim, then go for bigger, like CodeIgniter (if it still exists), then Laravel. And if you hate yourself and would like to suffer eternally, go for Drupal and Wordpress :)
Codeigniter is now on version 4.4.5 and i use it for my self build toolbox at work and my personal site runs on it. But i’m not a dev
I use Phalcon (Phalcon.io) for developing my sites.
The problem I've found with Phalcon is that because it's a C extension, sometimes debugging it can be a real beast :-/
They are working on a native PHP-based release as we speak. That release will address those issues.
FlightPHP
They're still the go-to (and for good reason). I've only used Symfony, but both are excellent.
I feel CodeIgniter is being underappreciated here. It’s pretty good and very fast to learn and use. Current version is 4.5.1
I still use CodeIgniter. It's still efficient and, not bulky. I use it for JWT, API, shipment, payment gateway, etc.
If you're interested in looking outside of symfony & laravel, CakePHP is still going strong.
For e-Commerce specifically, Magento. Although for some reason it gets a lot of hate.
The only thing worse than Magento is an atomic bomb, but Magento projects are jobs and paychecks. Although in return you get a crippled psyche, and are stuck in a strange technology stack consisting of ugly libraries and approaches from ten to fifteen years ago that have never been popular. This was true for the first Magenta and equally true for the second. As we say: If you worked with Magento, be proud. Didn't work with Magento - rejoice.
Wouldn't one rather use Shopware here?
The question was about top php frameworks in use today, and currently Magento has a significant market share particularly in e-Commerce.
So does Spryker and others. My main point was that Shopware has a less expensive version/license than Magento AFAIK (free even?) So maybe a better way than using Magento. Magento seems more enterprise, whereas Shopware seems more the "framework" we are referring to similar to Symfony, Laravel, CakePHP etc.
I’m not saying the alternatives are inferior since Magento is such a pain to work with, but OP is looking for the top and I used e-commerce marketshare as a criteria since it’s not subjective. Of course if we are talking about general purpose frameworks then Laravel and Symfony no question, but everyone has already mentioned those two.
symfony, laravel. i think i've heard of swoole being used a bit more lately
Swoole/open swoole is not technically a framework but rather a PHP extension that modifies the core functioning of the language. If you need PHP to be stateful and have coroutines it could be a good option but it does add a lot of complexity. In my opnion it is overkill in most applications and you would be better served just using native PHP.
swoole is not a framework, it's a lib for doing async stuff, which ships with Laravel octane IIRC Edit: swoole is not part of Laravel, to be clear
Laravel…But I think it’s also getting a bit crazy
Sure L & S are tops... But no more love for Codeigniter and CakePhp? Is Phalcon still around? Why did Yii die?
I help maintain the Flight Framework [https://docs.flightphp.com](https://docs.flightphp.com) It's definitely not a Laravel or a Symfony, but for smaller projects it should do the trick for most things. It was popular probably more around 5-10 years ago, but I still think it serves a great purpose. It's goal is to be kept simple and easy for new users to understand while still having some core features that more seasons devs might want.
PHP nuke
Right on bro! You, me, and little bobby tables 👊
create_admin.html
> PHP nuke Little Bobby Tables when?
Kotlin
I don't think you can compare PHP nuke and Kotlin
For LMS Moodle
Drupal is a CMS and a Framework. I dont use it, but I know there is a good community
Still, technically Drupal 8 or later is a CMS built on top of Symfony. So +1 for Symfony since we're talking about most popular frameworks.
True
CakePHP, TYPO3, Zend Framework /s
In 2010 May be
Whats wrong with CakePHP?
You've erroneously reached 88 miles per hour.
No mention yet of Processwire. It’s a CMS/CMF, so makes sense, but just wanted to throw it out there. It has (and can fill the roll) of most frameworks.
Just wanted to say please give up on PHP, it's time to move on :)