Deciding on which of these two will be better for your project could be difficult – both of them have some pros and cons, which you should know before you selected Laravel or Symfony. That is why we decided to prepare a quick comparison between these two, and we hope that after reading this article, you will not have any doubts about which of these frameworks will be the best for you.
Laravel is an open-source framework that follows a model-view-controller design pattern. It reuses existing components of different frameworks to create a web application. It also consists of basic features of PHP frameworks like Yii, CodeIgniter, or Ruby on Rails. If you have a good knowledge of Core PHP and Advanced PHP, Laravel will occur for you so much easier. It is well-known for the simple coding approach and reducing the development time framework, which is great for developing a PHP application.
Symfony – this framework is also based on open-source PHP projects like Propel, Doctrine, PHPUnit, Twig, and Swift Mailer. Despite the fact, that it has its components like Symfony YAML, Symfony Event Dispatcher, Symfony Dependency Injector, and Symfony Templating. Since 2005 Symfony has risen as a more and more reliable and mature framework. It is mainly used for complex enterprise projects.
The first one is the most obvious – they both use PHP as their programming language.
They are cross-platform, which means that they are computer software that is implemented on multiple computing platforms.
It is worth mentioning that both are multi-user and multi-language content. The two provide the scaffolding of the application, pattern for interfaces, and support text search.
Despite some similarities connecting these two frameworks, we are definitely able to point out differences too.
Symfony might be named as a conventional PHP language – it could be modified to C# or Java, but of course, it consists of unique and one-of-a-kind elements which make it outstanding. In 2022 Laravel appeared as the most popular PHP framework. It relies more on magic methods and traits. This makes the code shorter and the whole framework easier to understand. Symfony is designed for a bit larger-scale or more complex projects containing huge features and is used by a significant number of clients. At the same time, Laravel is related to the MVC design pattern, which was aforementioned. When it goes to scalability, if you choose Laravel, you should be aware of the necessity of writing the code for handling this. Symfony provides several platforms for maintaining scalability – it scores a point.
Templating engine – Symfony supplies Twig, but Laravel provides Blade, which has a great benefit – you could reusable the code. That option does not exist in Twig.
When choosing a PHP framework, you should be driven by the project requirements and consider your developers’ preferences. Some of them may have good arguments for choosing one of the technologies.
If you are interested in database support – both provide object-relational mapping for data access. Symfony uses Doctrine, Laravel – Eloquent.
And last but not least – the speed. In Laravel speed of the application is similar to the other PHP application. It secures a proper version control system, which helps the migration of applications later. If Symfony is properly implemented, the speed of the application improves. It adjusts an individual core feature speed, so the whole application can easily decide which features are required at the moment.
| Laravel | Symfony | |
|---|---|---|
| Modularity and Scaling |
Utilizes MVC-based apps, with a number of pre-built dependencies. This makes it slightly less flexible, but more user-friendly if you’re using MVC- apps. |
Uses reusable components, ensuring more robust modularity. Code is organized better. |
| Templating Engine |
The default templating engine is Blade, allowing for code reusability that you don’t get with Twig. Lumen is another sub-framework the framework uses, making it perfect for building APIs. |
Uses Twig as its default templating engine. |
| Database Support |
Utilizes object-relational mapping (ORM) for data access through Eloquent. Laravel supports the following databases out of the box: MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite and SQLServer. |
Utilizes object-relational mapping (ORM) for data access through Doctrine. Symfony supports the following databases out of the box: Drizzle, MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, SAP Sybase SQL Anywhere, SQLite, SQLServer. |
| Database migrations |
Database migrations are manual, but don’t require defining fields. |
Data migrations happen automatically, requiring only simple definitions for fields within the model. |
| Data modeling |
Requires substantial knowledge of SQL. Eloquent also usually ties your app to the DB schema design, making it much less flexible in that regard. |
Does not require significant SQL knowledge, though you must create a repository for each call. |
Laravel seems to be perfect for projects when you need to develop your app quickly, and you do not want to spend so much money. When you decide to download Laravel, you will get many ready-to-use implementations that make the work easier. But on the other hand, not every solution will occur useful for you, and you might have never used it.
When it goes for the authorization with this framework is extremely easy – you should only configure a database and models during migration.
Magic methods are the greatest advantage of Laravel – you can avoid too complicated and too long code. It is saving the time, money, and mental health of your web developer.
Symfony is an answer for long-term, complex projects. It requires you higher financial outlays, but it returns the favor when you want to personalize your app. New versions of Symfony – for example, Symfony 4 provides you with only the most necessary things and allows you to add only those elements you will truly demand. This framework consists of bundles – you can make profound changes at the level of the bundle, and as a result, you do have not to change the whole project.
Symfony can be quicker than other frameworks – its speed depends on the velocity of individual elements, so a good selection might be helpful.
Laravel and Symphony are both popular and trustworthy. As we mentioned before, the crucial thing is to consider what project we want to launch, what features it should have, and what goal we want to achieve. We hope that after answering these questions and reading the article, this hard choice became clear.
Laravel has many advantages. First of all, it has a very friendly syntax and excellent documentation. It is very flexible, easy to scale and expand. It's super popular - it's easy to find a developer and help the community. Quick and ready to integrate with the front-end - a big advantage. CLI, LTS, cron jobs - it's all ready to use.
Symfony allows everyone to work quickly and efficiently. It has a huge amount of reusable components to use in many situations. Twig, the Templating system in Laravel is one of the most popular among programmers. Symfony allows you to debug the network, has a huge community, plug-in packages. Developers like Symfony because it is user-friendly.
Laravel and Symfony are not the only PHP frameworks. Others are: Codeigniter, cakePHP, Yii, Zend Framework, Phalcon, FuelPHP, PHpixie, Slim.
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There are many typos in this article, but either way, isn’t to bad of one! I prefer Laravel because of how fast you can go from design, to prototyping, to development, to production with Laravel, especially as the code is very reusable. In terms of the speed you mentioned for mobile, that can be fixed fairly easily by caching your routes, views, controllers, and models using Artisan. There is about a 23% Difference when doing such, and you can also check your PageSpeed Insights to get an even clearer perspective on how to make your site even faster. With just a little bit of research, it is very possible to get a 95+ on PageSpeed with Laravel. The only reason the Symfony seems faster, is in terms of how you can swap out any components you don’t need at all. Don’t get me wrong, it it still very fast, and Laravel even uses a few Symfony components in it’s own framework, but Laravel can still excel in speed. In Symfony 4, it saw a much larger speed increase, and Laravel ended up adding some of it’s components into it’s own code. An example of Laravel using Symfony is present in it’s installer mainly, as it uses symfony/console, symfony/filesystem, and symfony/process as you can see on the installer’s packagist.
I have the filing that this article was writted by a more Symfony friend as Laravel. But, regardless, I would recommend to also make more two mentions: 1- the difference between the ORM’s (Eloquent -> Active Record and Doctrine -> Data Mapper), because this interfere a lot how you build you application. 2- the documentation (Here, without discussion, Laravel is some good steps in front, and this can make a big difference, believe)
Laravel is for pros. Symfony is for experts 😉
On a more serious note: when I work with Symfony projects that are ~7 years old I find little trouble, except for missing out on new features. However, when I work with Laravel projects that are just as old, I endure lots of frustration.
It might be coincidence that developers for those Symfony projects did a better job than the developers on the Laravel projects did. To my beliefs a big part of the difference lies in the framework:
Laravel offers Facaded, helpers and magic that help you write less code, but also enables you to write code that is bad to maintain. Symfony somewhat enforces their best practises on you, which might feel like you have less freedom, but that’s often just a matter of lack in experience.
Consider this: less code in Laravel means that you’ll have to do/know more out of your head, while in Symfony you can just read the code that is missing in Laravel. This potentially makes Laravel quicker to work with when you’re working on something on your own, but it makes Symfony more suitable when it is a team effort or a long-term project.
Here’s my take:
* Laravel is the better choice for people who are relatively new and want to gain more experience. It is perfect for student projects, since it’s not long-term and you don’t want to waste too much time on a learning-curve.
* Symfony is the better choice for companies that build projects for their clients. These projects should be robust for the long-term and suitable for developing as a team. If you’re absolutely certain that a project is small or short-term, then Laravel might be a better pick, but personally I’d stick with Symfony: once you already have a couple of projects in Symfony, then Laravel won’t be faster to work with (at least I definitely cannot build a project faster with Laravel than I can with Symfony)
I think Twig is reusable, you can extend a base template, and include another snippets. It also have a lot of filters, and you can override content blocks too.
Another complete non sense comparison. I was a fan of Symfony in past but not anymore. To people who thinks Laravel have more magic I would say Symfony have even more. You ever wondered how those annotations works. In Laravel everything is in PHP. I know same can be done in Symfony too but it’s way too verbose. Simply put both framework are pro grade.
I have seen people mentioning Twig doesn’t provide re-usability like blade. But as far as I know, Twig provides as much re-usability as Blade templates, if not better.
You can extend the templates and even pass variables making it really useful in maintaining modularity and re-usability. Drupal uses it very efficiently, providing for total separation of the theme layer.
What Laravel does is, making things easier for a starter and for quick prototyping.
I’m still new to Symfony and should say that, getting started is a tougher learning curve there. But I’ve used Drupal which uses many of the underlying principles & components of symfony. (By the way, Laravel also uses many symfony components). What I like about systems like Symfony and Drupal is that such projects are better organised and provide for modularity. The main challenge with such systems is that you have to get your head around the abstract concepts behind. Once you have a grasp of it, it is a joy to work with such systems, if you love creating well engineered products.
Laravel on the other hand takes a practical approach. Practical in the sense, as it provides an easy learning curve and quick time to market with your initial projects. So for a newbie or a freelancer, to get going and gain confidence, Laravel is a perfect tool. Also, this might be all that is needed for many out there.
But inspite of the initial learning curve, I feel, the development speed could be more or less the same, as you gain the experience and will have your own starter kits/templates for projects.
Those who are passionate about technologies, wants to build on their expertise and/or grow as a team, etc., would find Symfony appealing as it will help you create better maintainable modular code.