Laminas Project vs. Symfony

I would say you can use Zend with any project of any size but in a personal experience I would recommend it more for small or medium sized projects. Since the code you will be writing with Zend has more verbosity than the one you can write with other frameworks, that might be a problem to maintain larger projects.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Excellent interface for databases. I trust that no bad data will accidentally be injected causing the databases to become corrupt or drop.
• The routing is really great. We have a lot of custom routing and it makes it very easy to add or adjust routes and ensure they're getting where they need to go.
• Zend provides so much flexibility in the controllers for dealing with the view. It's so easy to customize the view to render just how you want it. Especially when dealing with a request that may or may not be ajax.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Zend Framework 2 is overly complex for small projects.
• Zend Framework 2 documentation sometimes overlooks small details, which means you will need to delve into the code directly.
• Zend Framework 2 bug fixes on GitHub usually take quite a long time to get patched.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

I absolutely love Zend Framework. However we are using Zend Framework 1 and when we get to the point that we need to go Zend Framework 2 (for PHP namespacing) I may explore other frameworks. When we chose Zend it was the best option for us. I'd like to see if maybe there's a better fit that doesn't have the same complicated overhead of Zend Framework

Incentivized

Zend is very usable once you learn how to use it. I've had moments where I thought what I want to do isn't possible but I've learned I haven't looked in the correct place yet. Zend is a Catch-22. It's very usable once you know how to use it. But I strongly feel it's worth learning

Incentivized

Zend Framework has the best (paid) support and ecosystem I've ever seen in a PHP framework. The company has developed many products, including Zend Server, Zend Debugger, and an Eclipse-based IDE that extends the framework to create an entire development platform that can improve developer productivity and software quality while maintaining the clean architecture that characterizes the framework.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

While Zend Framework is similar to Laravel and Symfony, and seemingly more popular among businesses, I feel like it is harder to use compared to these two. Laravel and Symfony seem more friendly to the developer in terms of documentation and ease of use, though Zend Framework isn't too far behind and can be more powerful.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Overall, Zend PHP Engine has had a positive return on our business objective of creating a medium sized web-application, debugging the application to assess problems before they occur, and to create dynamic API calls via our backend custom software.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized