Likelihood to Recommend It's well suited for large eCommerce stores as it requires much effort to set up and the development cost for setting it up is high. It's less appropriate to use Magento where you are looking for quick development and launch of the store. Also, it is required to have a developer or sometimes the entire tech team to manage an e-commerce store, so you may need to hire a few PHP developers.
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 Magento is perfect if our web design client likes a specific pre-made template and wants a fast solution. Magento allows us to customize its open-source code to create additional features and functionality. Magento saves small businesses time and money if they only need a simple solution. 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 Not the simplest of solutions to use or maintain from an end-user perspective Other platforms are better with regards to SEO in our experience Fairly sluggish and slow compared to other platforms without the correct server specification and performance optimization work. 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 Likelihood to Renew It's the dominant force in the SMB open source market. With the continued support of eBay/PayPal, Magento will continue to evolve and should be a market leader for some time.
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 In looking at a different platform to migrate to from Magento 1, we looked primarily at Big Commerce, Shopify and Shopify Plus. Our host was very negative about Magento 2, but we determined after a couple years it was due to the fact it had even more complexity (and very different) than Magento 1. Shopify Plus was attractive, but the cost factor for two sites led us back to Magento 2.
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 Delays in development leads to missed timelines and opportunity loss. High cost of development and maintenance may currently outweigh the growth. Better handling of customer and order information makes for better customer service. Excellent API has been a boon for integration with our ERP 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