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June 26, 2025
Choosing the right PHP framework can significantly impact your web application's efficiency, scalability, and maintainability. However, with those applications serving a countless number of purposes, choosing the best framework for your exact requirements can be a challenge. With so many options available, what's the best way to decide?
In this blog, I cover a few general considerations to use while evaluating PHP frameworks. Next, I've selected four of the most used PHP frameworks available for developers today. I made these selections due to their longevity and popularity in the ecosystem. For each, I will provide an overview, highlight where the framework excels, outline specific considerations, and describe best use cases.
Remember, there are no losers here. Each PHP framework is a strong choice, but often for different reasons, and the best framework for one application may be completely wrong for the next.
General Considerations for Choosing the Best PHP Framework for Web Development
A PHP framework provides the core infrastructure for turning an incoming HTTP request into an HTTP response. That’s because PHP is most often used for web development. At a minimum, frameworks manage HTTP negotiation, dependency graphs, templating, and error handling.
While evaluating your framework options, be sure to examine how each addresses these capabilities in relation to your requirements:
- HTTP Negotiation – To help ensure the PHP framework for web development you choose can meet your requirements today and into the future, review how it routes incoming requests as well as how it creates and returns responses to requests.
- Controllers, Request Handlers, and Dependency Injection – The best PHP frameworks simplify code management to automatically match requests to handlers and manage their dependencies.
- Templates and Dynamic Content – Most PHP frameworks provide their own template renderers, but you can simplify your code and maximize long-term flexibility by using a framework that provides only an integration layer to templating engines.
- Error Handling – To avoid errors (including the dreaded White Screen of Death (WSOD)), evaluate the PHP framework’s error handling options, such as if the framework automatically notifies users when something goes wrong, logs the error, pings a monitoring service, etc.
- Security – When evaluating a framework's security capabilities, see if it mitigates cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities and cross-site request forgery (CSRF) vulnerabilities, uses hashing algorithms, provides capabilities for end-to-end encryption (E2EE), and gives you tools to determine if a user is authenticated and authorized before managing requests.
- Maintainability and Testing – Testing the full request-response lifecycle is key to reliable apps, and some frameworks will offer specialized tools. These kinds of tools can be a huge boon towards understanding how all parts work together, and they can simplify and give structure to your testing strategy. However, they can also tie you directly to your framework at a fundamental level.
- Performance – A framework's baseline performance tool can work as a guide for users, providing metrics that show how fast the framework can return a response. However, the numbers can be misleading, as the response-time metrics will be based on a configuration that's set for minimum conditions.
- Extensibility – Framework authors often write code specific to their needs, and then generalizae how it works for wider applications. But, if your needs fall even slightly outside your chosen framework's capabilities, you will need to either alter how the framework works, use extensions to meet your requirements, or find a different framework for your applications.
Other considerations may also be relevant, such as rapid application development tooling, data storage, support options, and deployment. However, the listed eight capabilities are the most critical. Your best PHP framework will provide or address each aspect, saving you time and delivering improved application quality. Add some in-house architectural and structural guidelines, and you can develop anything.
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Laravel
Laravel is arguably the most popular PHP framework and ecosystem. Pick up any PHP magazine, go to any PHP conference, and you'll see Laravel heavily represented. It's hard to find PHP blog content anymore that doesn't reference the framework!
Laravel is a fully "batteries included" framework, with solutions ranging from tools to provision development environments, all the way to application performance monitoring. While its foundations are in Symfony (covered later in this post), Laravel focuses heavily on developer experience and more specifically rapid application development. It has a number of consistent idioms and practices to facilitate these goals, including starter kits that provide integrations with popular Javascript and UI/UX web frameworks such as React and Vue.
Where Laravel Excels
Let's be honest: the reason so many people choose Laravel is because it makes the most common web development tasks trivial. Things like API authentication/authorization, API token authentication, form validation, common CRUD tasks, and even admin panels and dashboards are all built-in, and you can probably find a solution to a task with a quick search within the documentation.
Considerations When Using Laravel
Many seasoned PHP developers point to a number of Laravel's practices as patterns that make testing more difficult. In particular, while there are ways to use Dependency Injection, most documentation and blog posts will use Laravel's "facades" — static proxies to Laravel's service container. Usage of these introduces global state, which can make testing more difficult — and when testing is difficult, developers often skip it.
Another area often noted with Laravel applications is performance. With a focus on rapid application development, many common practices are not necessarily optimized for performance. Fortunately, Laravel has several tools in its toolbox and ecosystem for performance profiling to help direct you to the most painful areas.
Finally, if you find that there are other libraries or tools that will better suit particular aspects of your project, you may find that integrating them into your Laravel application may be difficult — either due to the library's different usage patterns, or the difficulties in wiring them for use in Laravel. One in particular that comes to mind is the Doctrine ORM, which provides a number of features beyond Laravel's Eloquent, but which is notoriously difficult to wire into Laravel.
When Is Laravel the Best PHP Framework?
If you don't have any opinion on what framework to use, Laravel is never a bad place to start. It has a large ecosystem, meaning you won't struggle to find developers for your team, or assistance when you need it. If you have a tight schedule, its rapid application development approach will get you across the finish line easily.
Back to topSymfony
Symfony is both a full-stack web application framework as well as a library of reusable PHP components. It has wide adoption throughout the PHP ecosystem, and its code underlies many other popular PHP frameworks — including Laravel and API Platform — and PHP applications such as Drupal.
As an application framework, Symfony follows the Model View Controller (MVC) pattern, using both a front controller and page controllers. An event system allows hooking into various aspects of the request lifecycle, providing more flexibility for power users. Its "bundle" system allows developers and library authors to write re-usable code that can be composed into the MVC, provide controllers and event listeners (among other things), and extend the framework to enable comprehensive out-of-the-box features. It provides a number of hooks for runtime customization via PHP Attributes — including route wiring, argument validation, and more.
On top of the PHP framework,it also provides Symfony ux, which is a set of CSS and JS components that allow you to quickly develop usable web interfaces and symfony/console, a feature-full component for developing robust console commands and applications. Console powers Laravel's artisan command, as well as the Laminas CLI tooling.
Where Symfony Excels
Symfony focuses on end-to-end developer experience (DX) and configurability. Its developers and contributors are hyper-focused on making things turn-key and predictable throughout the framework, and they are incredibly careful to minimize backwards compatibility breaks with any new release.
Considerations When Using Symfony
Symfony is best when you follow it end-to-end and have done a deep dive into all of its integration points. It relies heavily on a combination of configuration, PHP attributes, and its event system, so you need to be versed in how these work together. You must also know what takes precedence and how to affect precedence in order to use it effectively.
While Symfony has a ton of built-in functionality with consistent new additions, it aims to keep this functionality focused on core activities, such as handling requests, rendering views, and validating input. Integrations and extensions to the framework are provided by third party OSS and commercial contributors, and you will need to review and vet these yourself. All said, there's likely a bundle already written for any task you may want to accomplish.
When Is Symfony the Best PHP Framework?
Symfony is a well-tested framework with longevity, dating back to 2005. It's a solid choice for any development team that has experience and expertise with testing, extracting modular and reusable functionality, and MVC paradigms. Its large user community and adoption amongst other frameworks and PHP applications make it a powerful player in the PHP ecosystem, and it's definitely one to learn and understand.
Back to topCakePHP
CakePHP is another of the old guard PHP frameworks, also dating back to 2005. It originally mimicked patterns found in Ruby on Rails, but has evolved in different directions along with the PHP ecosystem, adopting PSR-7 (HTTP Message Interfaces) and PSR-15 (HTTP Middleware and Request Handler Interfaces) along the way.
Even though it makes use of middleware as part of its stack, CakePHP heavily adopts the MVC paradigm and includes a built-in Object Relational Mapping (ORM) Model, while using PHP-based templating for its View layer.
Where CakePHP Excels
Because CakePHP embraces Rails' convention over configuration approach, it is incredibly testable. This approach also means that you can often generate code simply by creating a database table; its bake command can take that table and generate the model, view, and controller for you, and all you need to do at that point is fill in the business logic.
Additionally, because of how long it's been around, it has tooling for the most common web problems built in: search, authentication and authorization, internationalization and localization, logging, mail, validation and more. You won't need to look outside the framework to get things done.
Considerations When Using CakePHP
Because of CakePHP's convention over configuration approach, naming becomes something you have to consider. Database table names must be plural, and these will map to table and entity classes, controllers, and views. In other words, if you fail to follow the conventions, wiring things to work correctly in CakePHP will become more difficult and burdensome.
When Is CakePHP the Best PHP Framework?
If you need to quickly write an application that you know you'll need to maintain for years, you like MVC frameworks, and you're happy with letting the framework dictate your architectural decisions, CakePHP will be a good fit for you.
Back to topLaminas and Mezzio
Zend Framework was the Zend open source enterprise PHP framework, and was first launched to the public during the inaugural ZendCon in 2005. It gained popularity quickly, and over time spawned three major versions and two sub-projects: the REST API builder Apigility, and the middleware framework Expressive. In 2020, these were transferred to the Linux Foundation as the Laminas Project, and Expressive became Mezzio.
While the core of the offering was traditionally the Model View Controller (MVC) framework, the Laminas Project has focused its efforts on its middleware runtime, Mezzio. This has allowed users to focus on the building blocks for their applications, relying heavily on published web and PHP standards (via the PHP Framework Interop Group — PHP-FIG). Users can adopt only the libraries they need to enable features, and the framework focuses on long-term stability and maintainability.
Where Laminas and Mezzio Excel
Mezzio builds on several PHP-FIG standards:
- PSR-7 (HTTP Message Interfaces)
- PSR-17 (HTTP Message Factory Interfaces)
- PSR-15 (HTTP Middleware and Request Handler Interfaces)
- PSR-11 (Dependency Injection Container interface)
These building blocks allow for significant freedom of composition and encourage small, succinct code that is decoupled from the underlying business logic. Its middleware approach makes it relatively easy to abstract and decouple common tasks such as authorization controls, HTTP caching, session management, and more, which helps keep handlers focused on the specific business logic they expose.
Because of its strong emphasis on dependency injection and decoupled code, code written for the framework tends to be easily tested, allowing you to focus on making your code robust.
Considerations When Using Mezzio
Unlike most of the other frameworks listed in this article, Mezzio is not a "batteries included" framework. You will likely need to research and identify libraries for common tasks such as form handling, database abstraction, and more. This can often mean a longer initial development cycle for a team, particularly as different libraries may have different usage patterns.
When Are Laminas and Mezzio the Best PHP Framework?
Use Mezzio when you want to fully customize your application logic, provide re-usable per-route workflows, control the dependencies you bring in to your development lifecycle, and focus on long-term maintainability of your application.
Back to topFinal Thoughts
The PHP ecosystem is vibrant, and those of us using it are hugely lucky to benefit from having multiple great framework options to choose from. Many languages have one or two at most, but PHP has at least a dozen that are popular and wide spread, and many dozens more beyond those that often fill very specific niches.
Take the time to explore and determine which best suits your development style or project!
Zend Makes Mission-Critical PHP Possible
Whether you decide that Laravel, Symfony, CakePHP, Laminas and Mezzio, or another option is your best PHP framework, Zend is in your corner. Take advantage of secure and supported runtimes, advanced observability and monitoring tooling, and much more.
Additional Resources
- On-Demand Webinar - Developing Robust 12-Factor Web Applications
- On-Demand Webinar - The Consequences of Building PHP In-House
- White Paper - The Costs of Building PHP In-House
- Blog - A Developer's Guide to Building PHP APIs
- Blog - CMS or Framework: What's Best for Your PHP Application?
- Blog - When to Rewrite vs. Refactor Your Web App
- Blog - Laravel vs. Symfony: Which Is Right for Your Web App?