Likelihood to Recommend 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 If your business relies heavily on content creation, and particularly on blog posts, then WordPress is really the best option you have. But if you don't have a blog, you only need static pages, or you want to build an eCommerce site, then you might want to explore other alternatives.
Read full review Pros 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 WordPress is incredibly easy to set up and get running with little to no technical knowledge. Most web hosts will do it for you, since it's so easy. With thousands of themes available for free and for low cost, WordPress can accommodate any design you can imagine. The community behind WordPress is generous, and there are loads of educational opportunities both online and in person to learn and connect with other users. Read full review Cons 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 WordPress breaks often so you need to have someone who understands how to troubleshoot, which can take time and money. Some plugins are easier to customize than others, for example, some don't require any coding knowledge while others do. This can limit your project if you are not a coder. WordPress can be easily hacked, so you also need someone who can ensure your sites are secure. Read full review Likelihood to Renew My rating is based on the knowledge I have of the community that WordPress has had built around it for years now. It's as solid as it comes when you talk about community involvement and expansion. There's no other CMS out there that can match-up with it, hands down.
Read full review Usability It's a sophisticated but easy to use piece of software. Many of the content addition pieces are familiar from other pieces of software so there isn't a huge learning curve. And for new areas, there is a lot of info on WordPress.org as well as other WordPress help sites.
Read full review Reliability and Availability Anyone can visit WordPress.org and download a fully functional copy of WordPress free of charge. Additionally, WordPress is offered to users as open-source software, which means that anyone can customize the code to create new applications and make these available to other WordPress users.
Read full review Performance Mostly, any performance issues have to do with using too many plugins and these can sometimes slow down the overall performance of your site. It is very tempting to start adding lots of plugins to your WordPress site, however, as there are thousands of great plugins to choose from and so many of them help you do amazing things on your site. If you begin to notice performance issues with your WordPress site (e.g. pages being slow to load), there are ways to optimize the performance of your site, but this requires learning the process. WordPress users can learn how to optimize their WordPress sites by downloading the WPTrainMe WordPress training plugin (WPTrainMe.com) and going through the detailed step-by-step WordPress optimization tutorials.
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 WordPress itself only has community service so your experience will depend on where you turn. Online, through forums and community boards, support is rudimentary but effective. You can easily turn to your local community and find exceptional individuals who know and use WordPress regularly for more advanced, inexpensive, support. I'm rating this less than 10 because of the lack of any formal support provided by a company.
Read full review In-Person Training Varies by the person providing training. High marks as it's incredibly easy to find experienced individuals in your community to provide training on any aspect of WordPress from content marketing, SEO, plugin development, theme design, etc. Less than 10 though as the training is community based and expectations for a session you find may fall short.
Read full review Online Training It is very easy to find online resources to learn how to do just about anything with WordPress.
Read full review Implementation Rating WordPress is not a great solution if you have: 1) A larger site with performance / availability requirements. 2) Multiple types of content you want to share - each with its own underlying data structure. 3) Multiple sites you need to manage. For very small sites where these needs are not paramount, WordPress is a decent solution
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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 We have considered and operated within
Shopify and
Squarespace . Both serve their purpose for niche clients, but we do recommend WordPress as being the superior option. We find that WordPress is easier to use and offers maximum scalability while the others are more challenging to design, code, configure and launch.
Read full review Scalability WordPress is completely scalable. You can get started immediately with a very simple "out-of-the box" WordPress installation and then add whatever functionality you need as and when you need it, and continue expanding. Often we will create various WordPress sites on the same domain to handle different aspects of our strategy (e.g. one site for the sales pages, product information and/or a marketing blog, another for delivering products securely through a private membership site, and another for running an affiliate program or other application), and then ties all of these sites together using a common theme and links on each of the site's menus. Additionally, WordPress offers a multisite function that allows organizations and institutions to manage networks of sites managed by separate individual site owners, but centrally administered by the parent organization. You can also expand WordPress into a social networking or community site, forums, etc. The same scalability applies to web design. You can start with a simple design and then scale things up to display sites with amazing visual features, including animations and video effects, sliding images and animated product image galleries, elements that appear and fade from visitor browsers, etc. The scaling possibilities of WordPress are truly endless.
Read full review Return on Investment 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 WordPress helps us reduce website management costs because we can oversee updates in-house. WordPress is easy to use, reducing the amount of time we spend on website management. The ease of use enables us to offer website management for clients, helping us grow our capabilities/business. Read full review ScreenShots