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Symfony

Symfony

Overview

What is Symfony?

Symfony is a PHP framework from French company SensioLabs.

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Recent Reviews

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Symfony PHP framework has proven to be a highly versatile tool, catering to a range of development needs within the company. It has been …
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Symfony

8 out of 10
March 12, 2020
Incentivized
We use Symfony in our department for the backend of our applications. In the past, we used it for some microservices as well, but switched …
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Product Demos

Обзор Symfony demo flex - Symfony 4 Flex

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Fragrance lamp demo Home Symfony

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DEMO API Symfony - PHP - Back-end con Tecnologías de Libre Distribución

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TV watch list Symfony demo - Part 1

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[Demo] New Recipe of Decoupling: Drupal 8, Symfony and Slim Framework

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Symfony Application - Demo

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Product Details

What is Symfony?

Symfony Technical Details

Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(27)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

Symfony PHP framework has proven to be a highly versatile tool, catering to a range of development needs within the company. It has been used extensively for both front-end and back-end development, including notable projects like www.grossum.com. Developers have found Symfony to be particularly suitable for complex projects, making it the go-to choice for backend development in most mobile apps and web projects. The robust community support and opinionated structure of Symfony have played a significant role in its adoption as the framework for building the company's website.

The versatility of Symfony extends beyond web development, with its components being directly integrated into other PHP web applications, saving time and effort by implementing industry-standard practices. Symfony has also been utilized in various areas such as accounting, reporting, e-commerce, blogs, and bots. By leveraging Symfony's capabilities, developers have experienced accelerated development processes and benefited from the strong support of its community. From small APIs and console applications to robust and scalable web systems, Symfony has consistently delivered high-quality results across different types of projects. Its comprehensive documentation and large community of developers have also made it an attractive choice for lead generation projects, custom APIs for mobile applications, and personal projects alike.

Versatile and Suitable: Many users have found Sonata Admin for Symfony to be a versatile framework that is suitable for various purposes, including the admin part of their website and ERP systems. Some reviewers have mentioned its usage in high-load projects, such as a custom affiliate marketing system that processes over 180 million requests per day.

Easy to Learn and Well-supported: Several users have stated that Sonata Admin is easy to learn for PHP developers and benefits from a large community that offers thorough support. They also appreciate the well-written documentation, which emphasizes the importance of viewing the correct version.

Modularity and Integration: Users highly value the modularity of Symfony, allowing them to choose and use only the specific parts they need. They have experienced seamless integration with other PHP libraries and frameworks without encountering any issues.

Confusing and Difficult User Interface: Some users have expressed that they find the user interface of Symfony to be confusing and difficult to navigate, particularly when trying to complete tasks quickly. They feel that it requires more intuitive design and better organization of features.

Steep Learning Curve for ORM Doctrine: Several developers have mentioned that they have faced challenges with the default database ORM doctrine in Symfony. They believe that it is not well-documented and has a steep learning curve, especially when optimizing for high traffic scenarios. This can be frustrating for developers who are new to Symfony or looking to optimize their applications.

Difficulty Upgrading Bundles with Version Changes: Another concern raised by some users is the difficulty in upgrading bundles when there are version changes in Symfony. They have found it challenging to match the Symfony version with the selection of compatible bundles, as many things change between updates. This poses a significant hurdle during the upgrade process and requires additional effort from developers.

Users have provided several recommendations for Symphony based on their experiences.

Users find Symphony to be quite easy to use and appreciate its rich set of features for web development. This makes it a suitable choice for building management-type applications.

Some users suggest considering Laravel as an alternative to Symphony. They believe that Laravel offers extra time-saving features that may be beneficial for certain projects.

Users consider Symphony the best choice for a PHP framework with LTS releases. This ensures long-term support and stability for their applications.

Overall, users advise being patient with the learning curve of Symphony, especially for PHP developers with no previous experience with similar frameworks. While there may be some initial difficulties, users believe that Symphony can ultimately help them achieve their desired goals.

Additionally, users recommend considering other technologies like node.js or RubyOnRails in addition to PHP when selecting a framework. This would allow developers to explore different options and choose the one that best fits their needs.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-5 of 5)
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Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I have used Symfony a couple of times in the past both working on personal projects, as a freelance developer and at least a couple of times with different employers. Symfony is one of those PHP frameworks that at first had way too many things but with time, it started to become a simpler and more efficient framework to build simple to robust applications. In my personal experience, I used Symfony for projects which varied from small API's, console applications to robust web scalable systems. I had the chance to participate in projects where Symfony was used for lead generation projects, custom API's for mobile applications and small personal projects. The main reason why Symfony was used most of the times was the available documentation and the large community of developers supporting it.
  • Your coding speed will be increased thanks for Symfony Flex, a feature based on Symfony Recipes, a set of automated instructions to integrate third-party packages into your application.
  • The learning curve is just great for any kind of developer, from a junior to a senior, thanks to all the great documentation you will be able to get up to speed in a could of hours with any kind of application.
  • The code quality of Symfony makes it, as of today, one of the best architected and cleanest PHP frameworks available.
  • Performance can be an issue sometimes, especially with older versions of Symfony.
  • For some developers it might be challenging to start working with Symfony. While the learning curve isn't necessarily too bad, any developer willing to work with this framework, junior or senior, must have some strong architectural knowledge. If your software architecture knowledge is weak you might find yourself struggling trying to understand some of the design patterns used when working with Symfony.
  • Symfony comes with a significant number of external dependencies. Your custom modules will rely on a strict architecture and you will be forced at some point to spend a significant amount of time doing a lot of testing. This can slow down the development process.
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.
  • The software architecture
  • The community support
  • The documentation available
  • The compatibility with PHP 7.4
  • 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.
I would say Laravel is by far Symfony's greatest rival. Laravel was actually a PHP framework that appears from Symfony, using only the packages that it really required. After some years, both projects have grown apart significantly, but you can still see Laravel using some of Symfony's packages.

Symfony and Laravel both have a large community of developers with things to say about both.

In my personal experience, Laravel has better performance, a shorter learning curve and perhaps both lack of up-to-date documentation depending on which version you are working.

James Hilton | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Symfony was the chosen framework to build the website. It was chosen primarily for the community support and opinionated structure that is suited for large projects from the beginning.
  • Symfony bundles are libraries that are very easy to download and start using in minutes.
  • The default directory structure is very abstracted and decoupled and ready for large projects that require a lot of flexibility.
  • The support from the community is very thorough and the documentation is well written if you remember to view the correct version.
  • 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.
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.
  • It has caused a lot of time wasted and frustration with bundle updates.
  • It has led to very bad database performance with doctrine and it's lazy loading one to many relationships inside loops without the correct loading settings.
  • The default directory structure, when used correctly is well decoupled and supports good practices that have saved us time and reusability that other frameworks may not enforce.
Symfony was chosen by previous developers, presumably for its flexibility and community support at a time when it was one of the best.
There is a lot of community support but because Symfony is so flexible and unopinionated, there are too many ways to do things and if you lock yourself into one way, most of the advice online will not work for you.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
The Symfony framework underpins several of the applications that we use. Most notably, is it used by Drupal 8 core, and so it makes its way into many of our client projects. We have also used components of Symfony directly in other PHP web applications, as we find that it puts a lot of industry-standard practices in place saving us time and headaches. It's easy to use and always getting better.
  • Symfony covers all of the bases that one might expect from a PHP framework, it can essentially be a one-stop-shop for the lower-level components you might need when developing a PHP application.
  • Symfony is a fully modular library, allowing you to easily use only the parts you want, easily plug it into other systems, and easily augment or replace parts of it with other libraries.
  • Symfony plays nicely with other code. We've never had an issue using it with any other PHP library or framework we've come across.
  • It's hard to fault Symfony for much of anything today. There are occasional security issues, but they are typically handled professionally and patched quickly.
  • Symfony can be a heavyweight solution if you don't really need a framework. This isn't really a fault with Symfony, since it does allow you to only use the components you need.
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.
  • Using Symfony (or certain components of the Symfony framework) has allowed us to more rapidly and securely build custom PHP scripts and applications that would have taken us more time or had more bugs otherwise.
  • Spending less time coding and re-coding the basics that Symfony covers helps to free up our time to get more client work done.
  • Drupal 8's use of Symfony has helped to make its developer experience far better than ever before, keeping our developers happy and working at maximum effectiveness.
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.
Zee Gimon | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Symfony PHP framework for the development of the majority of the projects within the company. Some of the projects use Symfony for the front-end (for example, www.grossum.com) as well as the back-end. Symfony as a back-end is used for most of the mobile apps as well as the web. From all the research our developers have done and their experience, Symfony is one of the most convenient frameworks for complex projects.
  • 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.
  • For less complex projects, Laravel or Silex (or even WordPress) can be used. Symfony is better for enterprise products than just for the fun of it.
  • There are always debates regarding Sonata Admin for Symfony, but while there are people who dislike it, we use it and heavily rely on it.
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.
  • Considering it is one of the main frameworks we rely upon at the APP Solutions / Grossum, it had a wonderful impact on our overall business objectives :) Being an open-sourced product yet well-maintained, it is a great instrument for web and mobile development.
We've compared Symfony to Laravel, Zend, Drupal, and Silex (as well as to pure PHP) and it was so far the most convenient tool for enterprise scalable products. Among all compared, Laravel was next in line in terms of the convenience and ease. Drupal used to be popular, but now isn't really and besides, it uses Symfony's core since the V8.0.
November 10, 2017

The best php framework

Yasmany Cubela Medina | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Symfony is our main development framework, its stack or base components make up 100% of our products. We have built not just products purchased by other companies but also platforms for our internal consumption and company management. Accounting, Reporting, E-Commerce, Blogs and Bots are just a few of the areas where we have been using Symfony. Using Symfony allows us to speed up the development process and know for sure that it is strongly supported by its robust community.
  • RAD, with it, and with a huge set of bundles; you can start and leverage a project in just a few weeks.
  • Support for BC, its strong commitment on semantic versioning and not introducing any BC break in any minor version.
  • Evolving, its community and its main developers are always pushing forward on new components and enhancements.
  • Micro services architecture, even with the new introduction of flex it has a lot of room for support and enhance this pattern.
  • Form component, this component its always facing challenges on how to be more flexible and more easy to use and will has room for improvement.
  • Support and enhancement for non blocking /async programming with reactphp.
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.
  • Improve our development quality.
  • Improve our development speed.
  • Improve the relationship with our customers because our products are more stable.
Symfony is strengthened by its amazing set of components. It is more flexible and strong, now with the introduction of flex on Symfony 4.x it's even more flexible and adapting for the future. Its architecture is robust and allows developers to focus on products. Symfony has been the lead in the recent work of the php community.
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