Likelihood to Recommend If you need to create simple CRUD applications using a MVC framework, I could say CakePHP could achieve this. But with frameworks like Laravel on the market, I would have a hard time recommending CakePHP for anything.
Read full review Any small project which you want to have ready in a couple of hours would be probably a bad candidate for using Symfony. Even the most seasoned senior developer can easily spend hours or days creating a small MVP with Symfony. While Symfony's learning curve isn't necessarily bad and will depend a lot on the architectural knowledge of the developer itself, because of the modularity required by Symfony you will need to spend a significant amount of time coding. If you are looking for a quick project, perhaps this framework isn't the best solution. Robust applications can benefit from Symfony's architecture. I have participated in projects on different industries including lead generation, marketing and even some micro-services for other industries which use Symfony. Because of how thorough the framework has been architected, you will have a reliable solution.
Read full review Pros Easy learning curve Can be used by new developers without paying a formation The MVC is pretty well implemented Read full review Sonata Admin for Symfony is very versatile and we've used it for both the admin part of our website (even created a landing page constructor using it) and for the ERP system we've developed for inside use. It is easy to learn if you know PHP and the community is quite large so you can easily find experts to help you with issues. It's good for high-load projects. We have used it for the back-end of a custom affiliate marketing system that currently processes over 180 million requests per day. Read full review Cons The biggest issue inherit in CakePHP, and why we switched to Laravel, is the base configuration of the program. Most people aree that CakePHP uses old (outdated, even dangerous) PHP habits. There is some truth in this: Cake has not been as quick to adapt to the newer PHP versions as they should. I was always surprised that with new major releases, from 2.4 to 2.5 for example, that the minimum version of PHP will never increase. For example, CakePHP only requires version 5.2.8 of PHP, but it would not have been difficult to update the minimum version at least 5.3 when adapting a new version. Speed - our company had many issues scaling CakePHP to a medium size application software, even with using REDIS/memcache we would still run into many issues with the built-in ORM. Read full review There are so many ways to do things that FAQs around the internet may not work for the way you did it. The default database ORM doctrine is not well documented and has a large learning curve when optimizing for high traffic. Matching the Symfony version with your selection of bundles makes it difficult to upgrade bundles because many things change between updates. Read full review Support Rating Symfony has a great following and finding relevant articles or looking into social channels for support is quite easy. I have no comments on any type of official support because I didn't ever need to look into it.
Read full review Alternatives Considered Cakephp is more easy to implement and to learn that
CodeIgniter . That's why I switched pretty quickly from the first (
CodeIgniter ) to cakephp.
Read full review Symfony has become such a standard that many frameworks which previously may have been seen as competition, are actually adopting Symfony components to allow them to focus more on what makes their solution unique.
Drupal 8 has replaced much of its low-level internal code with Symfony components. Laravel utilizes much from Symfony and builds on it.
CakePHP was my preferred framework over Zend and
CodeIgniter , but now I typically prefer Symfony or Laravel depending on the type of application and complexity of what I'm doing.
Read full review Return on Investment Negative Impact - we ended up having to rewrite our entire web-application from CakePHP to Laravel. Read full review One negative thing to point out of Symfony is how painful it is to migrate legacy or relatively old projects from previous versions of Symfony into newer versions. Symfony projects are usually reliable and provide the results you need. Performance can be an issue sometime depending on the kind of project you are working on. Symfony can have some issues with cache. Read full review ScreenShots