When you think of building modern, full-stack web applications, Laravel and Symfony are the two frameworks used by many developers and engineers. They are rich with various amazing features, helping developers work faster and focus more on business objectives.
If that is what you are struggling with, search for the answer to Laravel vs. Symfony: a better PHP Framework? But, when you are asked to pick one, it becomes quite tough to say which is better. Then, here is a quick and meaningful guide that will take you through the pros and cons, similarities, use cases, and differences between Laravel and Symfony.
Table of Contents
A Glimpse To Symfony vs. Laravel: Which is Best For Web Development in 2021!
Before talking individually, let’s see the market share of both frameworks. Symfony has a market share of 33%, whereas Laravel has 10%.
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Laravel Overview
Laravel is a well-known, easy-to-use, open-source PHP framework with the advantages of HTML authentication, widely accepted community, front-end templating, and more. Its expressive, elegant syntax attracts developers to take advantage of this free framework.
Besides, while creating an application, it promises not to let the user sweat for any small things while creating something amazing. In short, it is designed to provide a better developing experience with powerful features.
Pros
- With great community support and ease of use, it utilizes the best of all PHP standards and coding practices.
- Easy to build commands give you smooth access to its services and resources.
- It is well documented; whether you are a beginner or experienced web developer, getting started with Laravel is simple.
- Like Jade in Nodejs, Laravel has a Laravel blade templating engine that helps in saving time while writing HTML logic.
- Easy integration with third-party tools.
- It comes with the model-view-controller (MVC) architectural pattern.
- It is incredibly scalable, distributed cache systems like Redis, built-in support, and much more.
- Has multiple features for developing, testing, and deploying the product.
- It is lightweight and works well with any size of the project.
- It has its own Artisan CLI; delivering a seamless data migration process during the development stages is a plus point.
- Best place to find Namespaces, HHVM support, log management, quality control sessions, and more.
- It is updated regularly for a better user experience, which is great.
- Eloquent ORM, supporting easy interaction with databases.
Cons
- Besides, using GitHub’s issues, you have to use a better tracking system. Indeed, it would help in business support.
- They don’t provide NoSQL support.
- Although documentation is excellent, at some point, you might find it incomplete. Some of its helper functions and methods are not documented yet.
- The upgrade process takes a long time, from a few hours to even days. It’s painful; the newer versions come with breaking modifications in terms of project structure and code.
- With Eloquent ORM, you might encounter some bugs.
Who is Using Laravel?
Big companies using Laravel are:
- Bitpanda
- MasterCard
- com
- überdosis
- 9GAG
- useinsider
- RazorPay
- BBC
- Kmong
- Hiver
- TourRadar
- Bitpanda
- WISESIGHT
Symfony Overview
Symfony is a modern enterprise-grade, PHP-based web application framework. It allows developers and engineers with the fundamental building blocks to create the custom solution that best fits your business needs.
Pros
- It is one of the clearest and well-architected PHP frameworks, improving the code quality.
- It is an excellent choice if you want to build something that users can access on the go from their mobile devices.
- It immensely benefits protecting your investment in your web application through its release cycle every two years.
- They produce what’s called an LTS. Besides, it is easy to upgrade between the different LTS versions.
- It saves time by not reinventing the wheel with every project.
- Symfony is a great fit for a custom eCommerce application or custom order management application, or website.
- In the longer term, it ensures the longevity of your applications. For example, if a team builds something completely bespoke, it is relatively hard for a new team to pick up the project and continue at the same pace. In that situation, a framework like Symfony limits the risk.
- Also, Symfony allows to break down a project by separating the business logic from the data layer and the presentation layer.
- Symfony Flex helps increase the coding speed.
- It’s appropriate for any kind of developer, the learning curve for Symfony is great. Whether you are fresher or senior, its documentation helps in getting it easily.
Cons
- Sometimes, it might cause issues while using older versions of Symfony.
- If you are weak at software architecture knowledge, you might have to struggle to understand some of its design patterns.
- Microservices architecture needs more improvement and support for this pattern.
- The command line and codes are a bit tougher.
Who is Using Symfony?
Big companies using Symfony are:
- Statista
- Oxylabs
- Immowelt AG
- BlaBlaCar
- Typeform
- Trivago
- Accenture
- Stack
- Sainsburys
Now let’s check the similarities and differences in PHP’s two popular frameworks – Laravel and Symfony.
Attention, Readers! Don’t Skip; There Is Much More To Know On Symfony vs. Laravel 2021.
Common Features Or Similarities in Laravel and Symfony.
Since they both belong to the PHP family, common features are obvious. So, diving directly to the differences, let’s check what features are common in Laravel and Symfony:
|
Features |
Laravel |
Symfony |
|
Scaffolding |
✅ | ✅ |
|
Full-text search |
✅ |
✅ |
|
Multilingual content |
✅ |
✅ |
|
Programming Language |
PHP |
PHP |
| Extension/Plug-in |
✅ |
✅ |
|
Multiple Projects |
✅ |
✅ |
|
Revision control |
✅ |
✅ |
| ORM |
✅(on Eloquent) |
✅(on Doctrine) |
| Machine Code Generation | ✅ |
✅ |
|
Autofocus |
✅ |
✅ |
Whether you are juggling: why Symfony is better than Laravel or Laravel beat Symfony, the differences mentioned beneath would help to know your answer. So, keep reading!
Symfony vs. Laravel: A Brief Differences
1. Performance
Performance allows you to know how smoothly your project would work to the users’ end, whether it is a website, software, or web application. A set of unified APIs in Laravel works wonders for caching views.
On the other hand, Symfony caches source code and views by default. The reason why Symfony takes a longer time to load a website.
Loading time for:
- Laravel: 60 milliseconds,
- Symfony: 250 milliseconds
Score:
- Laravel: 1
- Symfony: 0
2. Modularity and Scaling
Symfony is rich in reusable components, which in turn have more modularity. Not only that, It would help in organizing the code in a much better way. As a result, it becomes a great choice for your sophisticated, higher, and larger projects. For this, we see many experienced developers pick Symfony over Laravel.
Besides, when it comes to Laravel, its principles revolve around MVC-based apps. So, you don’t have any other choice than MVC; Laravel will not go beyond it.
Using Laravel running, you might see it leaves your Symfony cohorts to dust. To deal with such situations, a set of prebuilt dependencies is somewhat necessary. Especially if you are thinking of building a complex or larger application, it’s always an ideal choice to go with the dependencies that will help you.
Accordingly, making such a choice will make your application easily scale and grow. However, in this criteria, one point goes to Symfony for offering modularity and flexibility.
Score:
- Laravel: 1
- Symfony: 1
3. Learning Curve
In terms of learning, which is the easiest to learn? Laravel is generally simpler to be taken for many developers who started with PHP. Still, on the other hand, for developers who have already seen another object language and are getting started on PHP, Symfony may seem much more obvious to them. So, it’s a tie.
Score:
- Laravel: 1
- Symfony: 1
4. Database Support
Symfony and Laravel both offer Object-Relational Mapping(ORM) features for data access. While using Laravel, Eloquent handles ORM. Similarly, while using Symfony, Doctrine handles ORM. As a result, both have the extra benefits of easy data manipulation jobs.
Besides, there are some database-related differences; to find out what, see the below table.
|
Database |
Laravel |
Symfony |
|
Drizzle |
✅ | |
|
MySQL |
✅ |
✅ |
|
PostgreSQL |
✅ |
✅ |
|
Oracle |
✅ |
|
|
SQLServer |
✅ |
✅ |
|
SQLite |
✅ |
✅ |
| SAP Sybase SQL Anywhere |
✅ |
Since Symfony supports more databases, one point goes to it.
Score:
- Laravel: 1
- Symfony: 2
5. Database Migrations
In Laravel, database migrations are done manually; besides, there is no need to define any fields in models. But, while using Symfony, you have to define the field in the models. However, here, the database migrations are done automatically. For this, Symfony won the game.
Score:
- Laravel: 1
- Symfony: 3
Conclusion
From all the above points mentioned, we got the highest score for Symfony. But, there is no denying both of them are rich in features. They are suitable for many types of web development projects.
Symfony is a great deal for the development of large-scale and complex web applications. On the other hand, Laravel is frequently the favorite choice for those who need rapid development, high speed, and greater performance.
Therefore, first, decide what you need, your project requirements, and then pick one that best fits your web project. Also, it’s better to choose the framework that provides you more comfort in overall web development projects.
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FAQs
Which is better: Symfony or Laravel?
Here’s the answer to this:
Laravel is good:
- As it is easy to learn with simple syntax and resourceful learning materials.
- It is a good choice for fast and high-performing applications.
Symfony is the best option if:
- You are planning to build a sophisticated enterprise application.
- It is well-structured, scalable, flexible, and easily maintainable.
Is Laravel based on Symfony?
One of the interesting facts is that Laravel is developed on Symfony components. It uses Symfony as its frame. Moreover, it supplements its logic and vision to write an application using the PHP language.
Is Symfony hard to learn?
If you are comfortable with object language, Symfony is easy to learn.
Which PHP framework is best for beginners?
Here are some of the PHP’s framework options you can consider for beginners:
- Laravel
- Symfony
- CodeIgniter
- Zend Framework / Laminas Project
- Yii (Framework)
- CakePHP
- Slim
- Phalcon
