Symfony is a flexible and well supported php framework but I consider Laravel better at everything.
March 19, 2020

Symfony is a flexible and well supported php framework but I consider Laravel better at everything.

James Hilton | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Symfony

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.

Pros

  • 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.

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.
  • 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.

Do you think Symfony delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Symfony's feature set?

Yes

Did Symfony live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Symfony go as expected?

No

Would you buy Symfony again?

No

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.

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