Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review Yii is very well suited if you love to program with Object Oriented PHP. This framework uses OOP very well and if you know this pattern you'll love it. The same applies for its MVC architecture and if you come from formal software development education. Also if you are in a bussiness enviroment and need a stable framework. This is the tool for you. It uses very formal scheme but I would like more open and hackable framework, and for this Yii2 is not a good option. Also, if you like to have bleeding edge technologies I don't recommend this framework.
Read full review Pros 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. Read full review Generating forms and integrates bootstrap Provides great CRUD functionality with active record Provides lots of useful HTML helper widgets for UI enhancement Provides good access control (RBAC) Read full review Cons 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. Read full review Maybe support to update their main components like jQuery or Boostrap. It's too attached with the included versions. Their view template engine is simple, doesn't offer support for better options like competition. Wiki can include more tutorials for common examples or problems. Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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
Read full review We are in the process of migrating our old application to Yii Framework.
Read full review Usability 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
Read full review I think is really easy to use, it's not perfect but many developers with great experience will know how to exploit this framework to create great apps!
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review It's has a really good support based on online documentation and official forums. But sometimes I wish there were a paid service where to report some urgent issues.
Read full review Implementation Rating You have to check their documentation, they explain everything so don't skip it.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review We have used
Zend Framework . In comparison Yii Framework is much more lightweight and has smaller learning curve.
Read full review Return on Investment 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. Read full review Overall Yii has speed up our development and help to cut down on development cost. On the other hand, the bloated vendor library does cause space issues when we have high volume of applications on our servers. Read full review ScreenShots