Using Symfony for a wide variety of projects
May 14, 2021
Using Symfony for a wide variety of projects
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Symfony
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.
- 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.
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.
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?
Yes
Would you buy Symfony again?
Yes