Laravel vs Symfony Which one is better for my organization?
A PHP framework is
the most common solution for web development in organizations. Currently,
you can find PHP frameworks such as Laravel, Symfony, Yii, CodeIgniter, CakePHP, Swoole,
among others. Although the most popular is Laravel and Symfony.
When making a decision about which framework to develop your web project with, you must take into account the pros and cons of each one in order to guarantee a correct
development and even more importantly, a correct operation and guarantees of
scalability.
Industry Statistics: Laravel vs Symfony
Google Trends tells
us that Laravel has been the most popular PHP framework for the last 5 years.
Comparative breakdown
by region:
Basic information of Laravel and Symfony
Symfony
Symfony is a
set of PHP components and a Framework for web
applications. At the same time, it is a “philosophy and a community,
all working together in harmony” . Thanks to its structure and
maturity, the Fabien framework is a tool adopted by most of the
major PHP projects on the market. The following are some
examples, among many, of those who are currently using its components: Drupal , Joomla , Magento , Prestashop , Laravel , Yii , CiviCRM ,Google
API , Facebook API , Composer and phpMyAdmin . This
is because Symfony is not just another PHP Framework, but a set of the
best programming practices, web standards and PHP libraries such as PSR,
Propel, Doctrine, PHPUnit, Twig and Swift Mailer.
Symfony is a tool
that we use in many projects at ITDO , and it is one of these
innovative digital tools that are also constantly adapting to survive in an
increasingly global and competitive world.
Laravel
Laravel is an
open source PHP framework that follows an MVC (model-view-controller)
development pattern, which allows very simple coding, reducing development time
in simple PHP applications. Reuse existing components from different
frameworks to create a web application. And yes, you have read the
previous paragraph correctly, 30% of Laravel's code is Symfony , but
with notable development characteristics in frameworks like Yii and
CodeIgniter. This is Symfony's little baby, who quickly learns from his
cousins Yii and CodeIgniter.
For this purpose of
using other well-known frameworks, not only does it not try to reinvent the
wheel, Laravel keeps things simple. It uses Symfony's core framework which
is the most stable, tested and solid to configure a completely new way of
developing with MVC (model-view-controller) to make our life easier.
Symfony vs Laravel
Although these two
frameworks are familiarly paired, there are big differences that make them
competing solutions when choosing a PHP framework for web development.
Clarify that in this
article I will not go into technical details of performance or library
comparison. If your priority is speed or having the most modern libraries,
I think this is definitely not your article. I assure you that the
performance, speed and the most modern libraries will depend to a great extent
on your code and not on the framework. When developing you must be careful
with the use you make of the Models and Controllers. In this sense,
Laravel is more flexible, allowing you to develop much faster and without so
many demands for good practices, on the other hand Symfony forces you to
maintain good practices such as the use of PSR , and this in the long
term translates into speed, performance and scalability.
Also, in case you
are interested in developing robust and scalable applications for your
organization, I think you should evaluate the choice of your PHP framework
beyond performance. You should evaluate it from the point of view of return
on investment (ROI) . As you would with the purchase or investment of
any other asset in your organization.
In 2020, Laravel
appeared as the most popular PHP framework. It is based more on methods
and features that makes it very simple, makes development minimal and the whole
framework easier to understand. Instead, symfony is designed for larger or
more complex projects that contain huge functions and are used by a significant
number of clients. Whereas Laravel is related to the MVC design pattern
mentioned above. When it comes to scalability, if your choice is Laravel,
you should consider the need to write the code to anticipate scaling in the
future. Symfony instead provides multiple platforms to maintain
scalability from day one.
From a front-end
point of view, Symfony provides Twig , and Laravel provides Blade ,
which has the great advantage of reusing code. However, one conclusion I
would draw from that is that Laravel is probably better to use as a front-end
framework, which does not require complex data storage functionality. It
is perfectly suited to be a service layer with its integration with Iron.io and
other popular SaaS providers (AWS, S3, sendgrid, etc.).
If one of your
priorities is database support, both provide you with an object-relational
mapping for data access. Symfony uses Doctrine and Laravel
uses Eloquent . Eloquent ORM is Laravel's greatest strength, as
well as its weakness, it is great and simple, but because it is so simple, it
is not that well structured and it does not have as much
compatibility. Let's review the database engine compatibility chart:
BD
Engine |
Laravel |
Symfony |
MySQL |
V |
V |
Oracle |
|
V |
Drizzle |
|
V |
SQLServer |
V |
V |
PostgreSQL |
V |
V |
SQLite |
V |
V |
SAP
Sybase SQL Anywhere |
|
V |
As you can see with
these options, Symfony supports more databases than Laravel. Because of
this, data manipulation and data management become much simpler with
symfony. And although today you discard databases such as Oracle or SAP,
you never know what the future will bring you, who knows the future needs that
your web development will meet.
Conclusion
It is clear that
each framework meets certain requirements. Both offer very useful
development aids and are quality frameworks. Like everything else,
deciding whether to use a framework instead of others is always up to the
developer, or the organization? ;)
Laravel seems to be
perfect for projects when you need to develop your application quickly and
don't want to spend so much money. When you decide to download Laravel,
you will get a bunch of out-of-the-box implementations that will make your job
much easier. But, on the other hand, if you want a robust and scalable
tool, you should think about Symfony, even if the learning curve is slower. Over
time I assure you that the time invested will pay off, you will remember these
words 2 years later when you have to modify a function in a controller that
affects the business logic of your organization and the work team is not the
same. Symfony is undoubtedly the answer for long-term complex projects
that require quality and flexibility, especially if your project is about
an API .
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