Comparing Technologies: Symfony or Laravel, Which Is Better for Your Business?

Frameworks make things easier for engineers because they provide standards for writing code and approaches to programming. They help create applications that simplify business processes and are capable to adapt the upcoming change. But understanding the variety of platforms, even within a single programming language, is not easy. And we are going to talk about the most popular PHP frameworks.

The major similarities between Symfony and Laravel

In a basic comparison, it seems that the technologies have a lot in common. The most obvious similarity is that both platforms are written in PHP, they are open source under the MIT license, and they both use the MVC architectural pattern. A closer comparison reveals even more similarities:

• A built-in templating engine (Twig and Blade);
• an ORM to support popular databases (Doctrine and Eloquent);
• a command-line interface (CLI and Artisan);
• unit-testing tools;
• interoperability with various operating systems;
• extensibility with third-party modules;
• multilingualism;

How they are different?

At first glance, the platforms seem almost identical, but the main differences lurk in the little things. For example:

MVC architecture: the default dependencies can limit developers, but the modularity can give more possibilities.

Templating: Twig provides an extra layer for more security and extra features, and is compatible with Slim and Yii, unlike Blade.

Although the frameworks provide similar tools – the tools themselves are very different in places.

Flexibility and scalability

Laravel is more strict about adhering to the MVC structure, and won’t let you deviate from that paradigm. The platform imposes several restrictions on the developer, which can only be bypassed by changing the entire application code.

Symfony provides a bunch of specialized tools to help cope with more users: ORM optimization, customizable hydration limits, a joining tool to reduce heavy queries, a mechanism for generating temporary arrays, and much more. 

Development speed

Laravel is made to simplify and free up routine tasks without sacrificing functionality. Things like auth, routing, caching, and sessions are much easier to implement here. Symfony will take more time to develop, but it will pay off handsomely when the system is scaled up. 

Threshold of entry and popularity

When it comes to documentation and tutorials, Laravel wins by a wide margin. The creator of the technology pays huge attention to the quality of documentation, and actively maintains a blog, podcast, and conferences, developing the entire ecosystem of tools around the platform. 

Symfony’s creators did not place such an emphasis on simple documentation and the popularization of the technology. However, the lag from the rival is not critical – docs are always up to date, but it is difficult to call it exhaustive. 

Laravel advantages

• high performance;
• rich ecosystem;
• easy to learn;
• huge professional community;
• high development speed;

Disadvantages

• difficult to scale;

Symfony advantages

• high performance;
• large professional community;
• easy scalability;

Disadvantages

• difficult to master
• relatively low development speed;

Conclusion: Symfony or Laravel, which one for business?

Both platforms have proven to be great. But to choose, you should define what is more important – to support a huge user base or the TTM speed?

In the first case, your choice is Symfony. It is intended for large-scale enterprise-level projects. It will cost more to develop in the early stages, but you’ll get your investment back as the system is maintained and fine-tuned.

Finding and hiring experienced developers can take months, and the initial setup and preparation of the architecture, and the end-to-end functionality will also take time. All of this is bad for TTM, a critical metric in the competitive race. Choosing outsourcing Laravel team will save you a significant amount of resources at the start and not overpay for something you might not need.