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 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 Pros Easy learning curve Can be used by new developers without paying a formation The MVC is pretty well implemented Read full review 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 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 Most people aree that CakePHP uses old (outdated, even dangerous) PHP habits.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 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 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 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 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 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 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 Return on Investment Negative Impact - we ended up having to rewrite our entire web-application from CakePHP to Laravel. Read full review 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 ScreenShots