Laravel vs Symfony: Check out the Key Difference comparison

PHP Development

Are you in dilemma? Would be best fit to your project?

In the world of custom PHP web development, There are several PHP frameworks in the market, Laravel and Symfony are the most popular. Laravel and Symfony both frameworks are fantastic choices in terms of speedy web development.

Laravel is preferred by developers for its fast development process, performance, and high speed. Whereas, Symfony is suitable for the development of complex and large-size web applications effortlessly.

Both Laravel and Symfony have their pros and cons, We’ve done a full analysis of the features of each framework’s capabilities.

Quick Overview of both the technologies

To better understand both Laravel and Symfony frameworks, let’s take a quick overview of both.

Laravel

Taylor Otwell created Laravel in June 2011. Laravel is a well-known open-source (free) PHP web framework, which is robust and easy to understand. Laravel framework follows qualified MVC (model-view-controller) design pattern and is built using the Symfony components. Laravel allows a developer to take advantage of a large library of pre-programmed functionality such as several useful built-in features, including authentication, sessions, routing, and mail with a strong community of support. PHP export developers across the world have praised Laravel for its consistent performance, rich features, and adaptability, among other reasons.

When all of these positive characteristics and capabilities are combined, they result in Laravel being an incredibly valuable framework that all developers should be familiar with and easily able to use.

Symfony

Symfony includes one of the best capabilities for tracking behaviour called Symfony profiler, which allows developers to trace the behaviour of any application by mapping all of its operations and activities on the back-end site.

Symfony is created by Fabien Potencier in October 2005. Symfony is open-source, Symfony is a set of reusable PHP components and a PHP framework to build web applications, APIs, microservices and web services. It also uses MVC architecture, which aids in developing scalable web applications MVC ensures that your project follows a logical structure.

The primary concept behind the Symfony Framework is to eliminate the difficulties in coding and save time throughout the web development process. so, Users should be able to design software for their own requirements.

Similarities

Below is a list of the most important similarities:

1. Both are Open open-source (free) PHP web frameworks.

2. Both are based on the PHP programming language, And follow the MVC pattern.

3. A CLI tool is available for common tasks.

4. Testing tools are available.

5. Both provide database support.

6. Supports ORM (Object-relational mapping) Doctrine for Symfony and Eloquent for Laravel.

7. Both Laravel and Symfony frameworks support cross-platform.

8. Cover the full stack leveraging existing projects (ORMs, Template Engines, etc…).

9. Supports multi-language content.

10. It can be extended easily.

Laravel Pros & Cons

Pros	Cons
Excellent Documentation	Not compatible updates
Using The Most Recent PHP Functionality	Insufficient built-in support
The Access Control Feature Is Built-In	Some applications built in Laravel might be heavier for faster loading on mobile
A Shorter Development Time	At First Look, Can be more difficult to learn to begin with if new to development
There Are Lots Of Packages And Resources To Choose	Unreliable third-party libraries
Database Migration Is Easy And Straightforward	It is not easy for legacy systems to get transferred to Laravel
Reverse Routing
Connects To Mail Services Easily

Symfony Pros & Cons

Pros	Cons
A significant amount of developers is using Symfony actively. It also has the biggest community in the market.	Takes time to build and launch.
Well-Known Platforms use Symfony.	Because of the need to rebuild code for multiple uses, testing requires more time.
Symfony stays updated to meet the web developers’ needs.	It depends on other technologies and that’s why some web applications might load slower. lacks origin elements.
Excellent code quality.	In the beginning, you may find it harder to learn compared to other PHP framework.

	Laravel	Symfony
Server Requirements	1. PHP >= 7.2.5(Version 7.x) 2. OpenSSL PHP Extension 3. PDO PHP Extension 4. Mbstring PHP Extension 5. Tokenizer PHP Extension 6. XML PHP Extension 7. Composer	1. PHP >= 7.2.5(Version 5.x) 2. JSON Extension, 3. ctype Extension 4. Your php.ini needs to have the date.timezone setting
Popular Apps Built	1. Studio Stomp 2. MyRank 3. Creative Spaces 4. Deloitte 5. Wattpad	1. Spotify 2. Trivago 3. Dailymotion 4. Practo 5. Colvin
Modularity and Scaling	Laravel’s strength is utilizes MVC-based application, with a number of pre-built dependencies.	The Symfony framework includes an extensive library of reusable components, ensuring more robust modularity. Symfony elegantly organizes the code better.
Templating Engine	Laravel uses default templating engine is Blade, a lightweight yet powerful template engine that is optimized for performance.	Symfony Uses Twig as its default templating engine, which was developed by Fabien Potencier.
Database Support	Laravel utilizes object-relational mapping (ORM) for data access through Eloquent. Laravel supports the following databases: MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite and SQLServer.	Symfony utilizes object-relational mapping (ORM) for data access through Doctrine. Symfony supports the following databases: Drizzle, MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, SAP Sybase SQL Anywhere, SQLite, SQLServer.
Database Migrations	In Laravel database migrations are manual. Laravel’s manual approach is not difficult because the fields do not require any specification.	In Symfony data migrations happen automatically. It requiring only simple definitions for fields within the model.
Data Modeling	Laravel requires a substantial knowledge of SQL. Eloquent also usually tie your application to the design of your database schema. It is possible that changing the name of a column will result in modifications throughout your codebase.	Symfony does not require more in-depth SQL knowledge, though you must create a repository for each call.
Projects	Laravel is suited for handling smaller projects that require fast implementation. Laravel have built-in authentication, easy migration of databases and simple configuring and significantly speeds up web application development.	Symfony is great option for large and complex web apps. For example, it could be an enterprise app, an e-commerce app or a music/video streaming app.
Security	Laravel has a more simpler approach to security, basic features are sufficient in most circumstances.	Symfony’s security system is powerful but, it can be a little complex to set up. It allows different ways of authentication as well as a very fine-grained permission model.
GitHub Star Ratings	69.9k stars	27k stars
Number of Contributors	611	2,589
Documentation	Textual & Video Tutorial on Laracasts, Treehouse, Sitepoint, Codebright, and Github	Basic Documentation on Symfony Community

Conclusion

Now, It is clear that both Laravel and Symfony are robust, reliable, and feature-rich frameworks. Laravel and Symphony are both popular and trustworthy. I hope blog will help you understand the major differences between the two most popular solutions for PHP. The thing is to consider that what project you want to launch, what features it should have and what goal you want to achieve.

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Laravel VS Symfony