Symfony

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.

If you need to use a Linux stack and you have something against Laravel, which I consider a simplified, optimized, and better documented version of Symfony, you should go with Symfony. But if you are inheriting a Symfony project, I would just try to upgrade it to the latest Symfony rather than switch to Laravel. Symfony can be very confusing to junior developers and its flexibility results in them writing bad code if they don't invest time into reading the whole documentation and studying the best practice examples.

Symfony is well suited for developing anywhere from simple to complex backends for web applications. I would even say it is suitable for developing APIs and services if you need to stay in the PHP realm. I see no major drawbacks to Symfony aside from the limitations of its core PHP language, not the framework itself.

If someone is writing a PHP application and looking to determine which framework would be best suited, I think Symfony is almost always a great choice. I sometimes prefer to use other frameworks or tools that were built with Symfony, such as Laravel or Drupal 8, but unless you need more than what Symfony offers, then using Symfony directly is simple and powerful.

Symfony is good for ensuring scalability of the project (granted, you also would require a cloud for that, but that's another topic), therefore it is a good framework to use if you are thinking about creating an enterprise product. Symfony's documentation is also done quite well, so that's another advantage because you can easily trace the changes and find out what happened when.

Symfony isn't the ideal choice for a small-scale website simply because there are other frameworks and CMS that would do that quicker and easier. If you, however, need strong backend for a project, Symfony's your mate.

Symfony is a strong framework because of its strong set of components. Its architecture allows Symfony to grow and allows us to use what we need. It is well suited for both small bots, console commands, micro services and big monoliths.