Symfony Vs Laravel: Which Is The Better Framework in 2023

When it comes to the development of a website in the limited time the developers, look out for the PHP frameworks. These tools are around here for a long time to ease the work of developers. You will find a number of tools that help in developing a website by saving time on repetitive actions. When it comes to PHP tools, Symfony and Laravel are the two best tools that are preferred by the experienced developers.

However, choosing between these two is the toughest call for the developers. To make the right decision, we need to go through the Symfony Vs. Laravel debate considering what each PHP framework has to offer.

Benefits of using a framework at first place:

• Speeds up the development
• Provides various organized and reusable codes
• Helps in the scalability of the applications
• Provides the presentation and logic separately under MVC

About Symfony and Laravel

Parameters	Symfony	Laravel
Launch Year	2011	2011
Latest Version	4.1	5.6
Number of Packages	7,500	16,900
Long Term Support
Number of Open Source Projects	25,300	76,200
Stars on Github
Number of Questions at StackOverflow	51,500	67,900
Number of Github Contributors	1,682	449

Similarities Between Symfony and Laravel

Parameters	Symfony	Laravel
Language	PHP	PHP
Patterns	Factory, Composite, QueryBuilder, Flyweight, Observer, Dependency Injection, Data Mapper	Builder, Factory, Repository, Strategy, Provider, Facade, ActiveRecord, Dependency Injection
Multi Language
MVC
HTML Templating	Twig	Blade
ORM
Full Text Search
Installation via Composer
Revision Control
Machine Code Generation
Extension/Plug-in

Symfony vs Laravel

1. The Programming language

The language on which the tool is based on plays a very important role while using it. You may be thinking that Symfony and Laravel use PHP, so both of them have the same programming language. However, there is a slight change in both regarding the programming language. Symfony uses the common PHP language, which means it's written only on the universal code that could be modified using the syntax.

Every language comes with some methods and traits that need to use in the programming and so does PHP. Laravel uses these traits and methods as it is written using the universal codes of PHP. This makes the codes smaller without any repetitive lines, easier to understand, and simply useable by the developers.

2. Database Access

Both the framework uses a different approach to access the data while building the web app. Where Symfony uses Doctrine, Laravel goes for Eloquent. Now, there are two things to look for, one is the migration and the other is data access in these frameworks.

3. Migration

As Symfony uses the Doctrine, the migration will take place automatically all you need to do is define the model. However, in Eloquent you need to do the migration manually, but there is no need to define the field in the model. So here I think that the game has gone for a draw.

4. Data Access

Symfony uses the Doctrine, so you need to create the repositories every time you want the app to access data, this could lead to large and complicated repositories. However, the work in Eloquent is easy and fluid as it uses the SQL functions for most of the actions, so you need to have a basic SQL knowledge.

Using Eloquent is better as in Doctrine most of the time your function will end up as an error, however, Eloquent even parse the most meaningless request into some accessible SQL function that saves your time and effort.

5. Codes

When it comes to crafting the codes in PHP frameworks, Symfony is considered as the best as it contains various reusable codes and offers modularity. Both Symfony and Laravel are based on MVC architect to construct the codes for web applications. But, Symfony is better for the complex and big projects as developers can use various components in a single project via modular style.

Symfony and Laravel both are template engines where Symfony has Twig and Blade are for Laravel. The blade is better than Twig as it has code reusability, you aren't required to write the same function twice in Blade, unlike Twig.

6. The Core

Another similarity that you will spot between Symfony and Laravel is the core, both the PHP frameworks are built on the top of the libraries. Both the frameworks call the libraries named “Symfony components,” but that doesn't mean that these are totally identical. Where Symfony calls its libraries directly,

Laravel adds its own elements, patching issue, and functionality to the components that might be missing in the Symfony components. So here I think the points go in the bag of both the frameworks.

7. Performance & Scalability

Talking about the performance of these frameworks we need to have a look at the output of each tool in terms of loading speed of the page. We have known that Laravel and Symfony both caching the views, however,

Symfony also caching the source code. But, the Laravel is made using the Symfony, that’s the improvement. The average loading time for the websites on Larval is found to be 60 milliseconds where Symfony is 250 milliseconds.

Wrapping up

The numbers above have already proven that Larval is better than Symfony on more points. Laravel is suitable for large projects that you need to finish under a shorter timeline with effective results. However, Symfony is best for the more complicated and time taking web application projects.

For more information on mobile app development and PHP frameworks, you can comment below and we at ‘MobileAppDaily,’ will try to assist you with the same.

Written By

Aparna Growth Strategist

Aparna is a growth specialist with handsful knowledge in business development. She values marketing as key a driver for sales, keeping up with the latest in the Mobile App industry. Her getting things done attitude makes her a magnet for the trickiest of tasks. In free times, which are few and far between, you can catch up with her at a game of Fussball.

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