Symfony against Laravel the Laravel vs Symfony: of the PHP Frameworks - (r)

Apr 3, 2023
Symfony vs Laravel

PHP frameworks have always been an option of choice for web development.

While there are many PHP frameworks, Symfony and Laravel are considered to be two of the top. Both frameworks are quick, secure, and convenient tools to create web applications swiftly.

If you're contemplating one or the other of these frameworks for your next project, then you need to know the benefits and disadvantages of each Symfony and Laravel prior to making the final choice.

What exactly is Symfony?

The Symfony framework comprises a collection of PHP components that work in conjunction: a web application framework, a concept and a community.

Through its reuseable PHP components and dependence upon the MVC design, Symfony is suitable for difficult enterprise tasks because it's a well-established and solid platform. This helps developers to save time and reduces code mistakes.

Microservices, Content Management Systems blogs, reports eCommerce platforms, bots and accounting systems are among the most common uses that make use of Symfony. Symfony framework. The primary goal of this framework is to let users to build applications that meet their requirements. Framework components are readily accessible for installations with high-end features.

Principal Features of Symphony

Symfony provides some eye-catching features that are quite valuable to get a business app up and running. Below are the best characteristics of Symfony.

MVC Design Pattern

Symfony uses the Model-view-controller (MVC) architecture, which is ideal for scalable and organized website development projects. This structure ensures that websites are developed with an organized system of files. It expedites and simplifies the development process , by ensuring the distinction between business and presentation layers. As a result, users are able to add more functionalities and features with no additional effort or effort.

Flexible URI Routing

It is the Symfony Routing Component has been an extremely popular routing component that has been which is adapted by various frameworks. It helps you build up routes within your PHP application and offers much flexibility. This is a good option to try routing Component if you've constructed an individualized PHP application and want features-rich routing libraries. It is possible to use this component to define the routes of your application using YAML.

Twig Template Engine

Utilizing templates is the ideal method to control and render HTML within your application in case you want to generate HTML using a controller, or create email content. Symfony makes use of Twig which is a flexible, quick, and secure template engine, to construct templates. The Twig templating language allows you to write clear, easily readable templates that are accessible to web designers, and much more powerful as PHP templates in a few ways.

Some of the reasons why Twi is so user-friendly include:

  • Twig's syntax is extremely simple and easy to understand, which increases the accessibility of templates.
  • Twig provides shortcuts to frequent patterns, like displaying the default message when iterating over an empty array.
  • The syntax is easy to comprehend and was modified so that web designers can complete their tasks swiftly without stumbling across any hurdles.
  • The syntax has been thoroughly unit-tested and is documented.

Session Management

There is a robust and flexible session subsystem integrated into Symfony HttpFoundation. Symfony HttpFoundation components. It is designed to facilitate session management through a simple interactive interface using an array of storage drivers for sessions. Cookies store data on the client side, although they can only handle a small amount of amount of data. A cookie typically has 2KB per domain and is different for each browser. The server-side data storage offered by sessions allows for massive quantities of data.

Error Logging

Symfony makes use of Monolog as which is a third-party PHP log-writing framework that could be utilized to create and store logs in various ways. Monolog is utilized to manage log-in to Symfony. Symfony logs are often kept within the var/log/dev.log and var/log/prod.log subdirectories of the directories of the project based on the environment. Yet, you can alter these settings in the Monolog package configuration file, which can be found at config/packages/monolog.php.

Symphony Use Cases

Here are some apps made with Symphony.

  • Trivago
  • Drupal
  • Wikimedia
  • PHPMyAdmin
  • Dailymotion
  • Spotify
  • NatGeo
  • OpenSky
  • Doctrine
  • BlablaCar
  • Vogue France
  • Doc planner

These aren't the only widely used applications created with Symphony You can also utilize Symfony to create almost any general application. For example, you can create learning management systems. Financial Wen Applications. SaaS applications etc.

What Is Laravel?

Laravel can speed up development due to its simplicity. It contains an Laravel dependency manager and a modular packaging mechanism. Laravel can be used by every type of business due to its prominent capabilities, reliable performance, verification sessions, and flexibility. Applications that are SaaS-based, multilingual CMS platforms, streaming on demand online streaming applications, and self-hosted surveillance tools are among the many applications of Laravel.

Principal Features of Laravel

Laravel has amazing capabilities like views, localization sessions handling, localization, routing to specific controllers with built-in authentication. The features that it offers can be found in the following sections.

MVC Design Pattern

Laravel supports the model-view-controller (MVC) design pattern, which ensures the separation of the presentation and business logic layers. The MVC design of Laravel has a variety of built-in functions, improves application performance and increases security and scalability.

Inbuilt Authentication

The Auth and Session facades are frequently used to access authenticating and session functions integrated in the of Laravel. These functions help to authenticate browser-based queries using cookies. They provide methods that allow users authenticate themselves as well as verify the authenticity of their account. Additionally, these services immediately provide session cookies for the user. They will also store details of authentication inside the session.

Blade Template Engine

The Laravel framework comes with a robust templating engine dubbed Blade. It makes writing simpler and allows using the engine to template quickly. The conditional statement and the sequence are just a few of the types of structures blade templates provide. Make a fresh view file and save it with the.blade.php extension rather than the .php extension in order to build an a template for the blade. The '/resources/view' directory houses blade templates. The capability to construct the master template, that could be extended by adding other documents, is the primary benefit of employing blade templates.

The Command Line Tool built-in by Artisan

Furthermore, the CLI tool allows interaction with resources as well as their configurations, through the creation of original MVC documents using the command line. Artisan assists developers in create and use commands. It is possible to write custom-code that make apps more efficient. The effectiveness of Artisan's software does not stop there. Designers are able to create packages, create and publish migrations as well as perform a range of related tasks. Artisan comes with a ton of built-in commands which is the developer's dream. Many people prefer the built-in commands, even having to deal using custom commands occasionally.

Unique Support for Unit Testing

Laravel is among the most frequently utilized PHP framework for creating applications. Also, it is acclaimed as a top testing perspective, due to the innovative features for testing. There are two ways you can evaluate your application in Laravel features testing and unit testing. While feature testing allows you to test your code base while unit testing lets you to build your own classes, controllers, models and more.

Laravel Use Cases

Laravel has a beautiful and expressive syntax. creating websites is simple and rewarding. Therefore many use cases can be identified using Laravel due to its easiness. We will now look at the apps developed using Laravel.

  • Pfizer
  • BBC
  • You are the most important thing to you
  • Ratio
  • TourRadar
  • Crowdcube
  • 9GAG
  • Fingent
  • Invoice Ninja
  • Cheesecake Labs
  • Belitsoft
  • Innowise Group

Symfony vs Laravel: Head-to-Head Comparison

It can be difficult to choose between these two, each with its own advantages and disadvantages that are worth knowing prior to deciding Laravel or Symfony for your project. To assist you to choose which one are the most suitable for your project, we have prepared a brief comparison between them.

Similarities

Since both these frameworks are built on PHP so it's not any surprise that they have similarities. So, the following are some of the similarities among Symfony and Laravel.

  • Both use PHP as their language of programming.
  • These two frameworks work cross-platform.
  • Both support multi-user and multi-language content.
  • They include the framework for the application as well as interface design patterns as well as support for text searches.
  • Assistance for MVC design as well as object-relational mapping
  • CLI tools for everyday tests and tasks are available.
  • Includes the full stack and runs on several platforms.
  • Characteristics built-in to internationalization and extensible
  • Developer support from a huge community

The Job Market and the Popularity

According to the statistics that 11,654 websites are using Symfony which is a framework, while 135,974 websites make use of Laravel. If you compare the market shares of these frameworks, Laravel is the top choice among sites with 10, 100, or 1 million visits. In terms of GitHub figures, Symfony has 25.4k stars, whereas Laravel is ranked at 65.8k stars. The number of contributors to the communities that comprise the framework is a crucial factor to be considered: Symfony has 2394 contributors and Laravel boasts 2576. These figures clearly show the employment market for Laravel is higher than for Symfony.

Curves of Learning Curve

Performance

Modularity and Scalability

Reusable components within Symfony allow for greater modularity. Larger and more complicated projects benefit greatly from the simple code structure. This is why a lot of experienced PHP developers favor Symfony to Laravel.

Laravel is only used for MVC-based applications. Laravel isn't able to help you when you begin to depart from the MVC model.

However, It's very easy to begin developing and test your application due to the pre-built dependencies of Laravel. It is essential to be careful when you pick your dependencies and the plugins you use for large-scale apps. The reason is scaling your application becomes difficult in the event that you are using a large number of plugins because they require to be scaled too according to the expansion of your application.

Security

Although Symfony is a secure system, it is difficult to configure. It supports a variety of methods for authentication and has it has a pretty granular permissions system. While Laravel has a more straightforward method of security, its essential features are generally adequate.

ORM

Symfony makes use of object-relational mapping (ORM) to connect data via Doctrine. The following databases are accessible through Symfony SQLite, SQLServer, SAP Sybase SQL Anywhere, MySQL, Oracle, and PostgreSQL. Eloquent is used by Laravel to retrieve data using the concept of object-relational mapping (ORM). Laravel is compatible with MySQL, SQLite, PostgreSQL as well as SQLServer databases.

Database Migration

Symphony automates database migrations. The models fields need only simple definitions. It may appear to be an instant win, the databases migrations using Laravel require manual work when you look deeper. However, they don't call for field definitions. In this case, both frameworks possess distinct advantages.

API for REST

Community and Support

While Symfony provides excellent documentation, it is complex. Laravel provides a wide range of courses, training and online support resources due to its enormous popularity. In addition, Laravel offers education and information through the Laracasts discussion board, Treehouse, Codebright, and Sitepoint. It is more difficult to learn Symfony than Laravel. While there is documentation, Symfony does not have as many tutorials or community help similar to Laravel.

Symfony and Laravel: Which Should You Pick?

There is no apparent winners among Laravel and Symfony since the entire game is determined by your final goal.

Symfony is the best choice if:

  • The application you are creating is complex enterprise application as it is organized, extensible and well-maintained.
  • Because Symfony has clear release dates for the next six years, it's much more unlikely that there will have any unexpected surprises when planning the transformation of a major lengthy project.

Laravel is a preferable choice if:

  • This framework may be new to you but is simple to understand and comes with top-quality learning resources that are simple syntax.
  • You're developing a startup product and you're testing your theories since Laravel developers are easy to locate, and they're great for quick development of applications.

Summary

Symfony Vs Laravel is a worthy debate regarding these two frameworks with a lot of features.

What should you select? All it depends on is the issues you're trying to solve and the technology that will do it best.

Symfony is great for web-based applications that are complex or long-term development projects which require innovative development methods. However, we would suggest Laravel if you want to build a simple web application with little expense and in less time.

What is your top choice to be the future PHP project? Let us know your ideas by commenting below.

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