What’s your go-to PHP framework in 2025 and why?

Lawrence_sam

Lawrence_sam

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Laravel, CodeIgniter, Symfony ey’ve all evolved over time.
For developers still working with PHP, which framework are you using most these days?
Do you prioritize speed, simplicity, or scalability?
 
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Symfony 5 to 7
Easier for everything. Needs nice skilsl at the beginning.

Laravel is also good but..
 
Lawrence_sam said:
Laravel, CodeIgniter, Symfony ey’ve all evolved over time.
For developers still working with PHP, which framework are you using most these days?
Do you prioritize speed, simplicity, or scalability?
Click to expand...
Symfony
I must admit it’s a labour of love, plus it’s the stack we use at my company
 
Symfony is great if you have a team or building something massive like @taktikbot mentioned, but for quick turnaround and solo projects laravel is hard to beat... the ecosystem is just too big now. i still use codeigniter for some smaller scrapers and micro services on cheap VPS because the footprint is tiny and it just runs. really comes down to what you are building but if you need speed of deployment then laravel is usually the way to go.
 
laravel is pretty much the default for me these days mostly because of the ecosystem. if you need to spin up an admin panel or auth you just pull in filament or some starter kit and it is done in an afternoon. but for basic scraping or quick landing page setups i still deploy codeigniter... it just boots up so fast on cheap shared hosting. symfony is great but always felt like too much boilerplate for the kind of fast turnaround stuff we do.
 
laravel is definitely the go to for building any kind of dashboard or saas tool because of filament and all the packages. saves so much dev time. but if im mass deploying scraper bots or simple landing pages on cheap $3 vps instances, laravel is just too bloated. still use slim or even raw php for that because memory usage actually matters when you run hundreds of them. symfony is nice but way too much boilerplate for quick stuff.
 
Funny how everyone lands on the same split here. Laravel when you actually care about the product, something lighter when you are just spraying landers across cheap boxes.

For me it's mostly laravel too but i'll push back a little on the "too bloated for scrapers" thing... if you turn off the stuff you dont need and run octane it's honestly fine, the memory complaints are usually from people loading the full kernel for a script that hits one endpoint. that said for the truly disposable stuff i'm with @XSMMDoctor, raw php or slim, no point pulling in a whole framework to curl a page and dump to db.

CodeIgniter still has its place tbh, had a batch of micro scrapers last year on a $4 vps and CI4 just booted and ran without me babysitting it. Symfony i respect but every time i pick it up for a quick job i end up writing config for an hour. great for the company stack, not for turnaround.

So yeah... depends what you're shipping. solo + fast = laravel, hundreds of throwaways = skip the framework entirely.
 
Yeah the split makes total sense. For tracking setups or quick redirects i don't even touch a framework, just raw php with some basic routing because when you get hit with heavy bot traffic even a light framework can choke on a cheap vps.

But for actual tools or backend stuff laravel is just too fast to build with. I used to run everything on CI3 back in the day but CI4 feels kinda weird to me now, would rather just use slim if i want something lightweight. @ricketycricket has a point about octane though, it makes laravel way more viable for high traffic if you configure it right, but honestly for throwaway landers i still prefer keeping it dead simple.
 
Been mostly laravel here too but the thing nobody mentions is the queue/horizon side. Half the reason i stick with it for scrapers isnt the framework speed, its that i can throw jobs at redis and watch them in horizon instead of cron jobbing a bunch of raw php and praying. for the throwaway landers though yeah, raw php every time, agree with the crowd there.

One thing on @High Dragon Agency that 64% number... feels high to me, laravel dominates the noise online but i see a ton of legacy CI and even plain php still running quietly in the wild that never shows up in those stats. survivorship thing i guess.

Symfony i only reach for when its someone elses long term codebase. solo i never have the patience for the config.
 
yeah @JaxonWP makes a solid point about horizon. managing multi-threaded worker queues in raw php or even slim is a massive headache once you scale past a few basic cron jobs. having that dashboard to see what failed saves hours of debugging when doing automated account creation or heavy API scraping.

for landers though i dont even bother with php half the time, just static html and a basic js router if needed. less stuff to break when a campaign gets hit with sudden bot traffic.

that 64% stat is definitely survivor bias... there are so many legacy affiliate setups running on ancient CI2 and custom php spagetti code that just sit there making bank without ever being updated.
 
Laravel for anything I know I’ll have to maintain or hand over later. The boring stuff like auth, queues, mails, admin panels, failed jobs etc is already solved and that matters more than raw speed most of the time.

For campaign landers/redirects I’m with the raw php crowd though. Had one setup where Laravel was fine in staging, then bot traffic made the cheap VPS cry because every request was doing way more bootstrapping than needed. Rewrote it as dumb PHP + nginx rules and it ran for months.

Symfony is nice but I only really enjoy it when there’s a proper team and specs. Solo work... nah, too much ceremony for me. CodeIgniter still has that “just upload and it works” charm, even if it feels a bit dated now.
 
the queue point is the real one imo. everyone argues laravel vs raw php on boot speed but the actual reason i keep reaching for it on scrapers is horizon + redis, watching jobs fail and retry beats cron + raw php and hoping.

octane changes the math too. people who say laravel cant handle traffic usually never turned octane on, it stays warm instead of rebuilding the kernel every hit. wont save a $3 box doing hundreds of instances but for a single high traffic tool its fine.

still... for throwaway landers im in the raw php + nginx camp. less moving parts, nothing to break when a campaign gets sprayed. and yeah that 64% feels inflated, theres so much old CI and plain php quietly printing money that never shows in any survey.
 
For me the deciding factor is usually who has to touch it 6 months later. If it's only me and I need to ship fast, Laravel wins just because I know the ecosystem and can glue together queues, auth, admin, billing etc without thinking too much. If its a client team with stricter devs then Symfony is easier to defend long term, even if it feels slow at the start.

One thing not mentioned much is dependency rot... Laravel projects with 30 packages can become annoying after a year if you installed every shiny thing. For tiny campaign stuff I still go raw PHP or Slim, because no framework update is the best framework update sometimes.
 
honestly the maintenance thing is what kills laravel for me when running networks. if you have 50+ small affiliate sites or lead gen landers, keeping laravel updated on all of them is a massive headache. raw php or just a basic index.php with some routing and a flat file db literally never breaks... you can leave it for five years and it still works. i only boot up laravel when building a proper saas or a central backend panel to manage the nodes. symfony is great if you get paid by the hour by some corporate client but for solo speed it's just too much friction.
 
agree with @SignalMint on the update nightmare. managing dozens of laravel sites when php versions get upgraded by the host is just asking for broken sites. i learned that the hard way with a network of lead gen sites a while back... spent a whole weekend fixing composer errors.

for actual SaaS or backend dashboards where i need stripe and queues, laravel is the easiest choice. but for landers and redirect scripts? raw php or even just simple static html with some js is still king. way less footprint and it literally never breaks. symfony is great if you have a team paying for the dev hours, but solo it just slows you down too much.
 
The 64% thing aside, nobody's really touched on FrankenPHP yet which kinda surprises me reading this. If you're already in the laravel + octane camp like @SMM Junction, running it through frankenphp gives you the worker mode plus a static binary you can just drop on a box. Cuts down a chunk of the deploy headache @Campaigns By Mike was complaining about since you're not fighting the host's php version every time they bump it.

That said i still land on the same place as everyone else here for throwaway stuff. Raw php + nginx for landers, laravel only when theres queues and billing involved. CI for me is more legacy maintenance these days than something i'd start fresh with, but it does just sit there and work which counts for a lot.

Symfony i honestly only touch when im paid to, same as the others. solo it's too much ceremony for the kind of turnaround we need.
 
Laravel remains my go to PHP framework thanks to its clean syntax, rich ecosystem and strong community support. It speeds up development while making applications easier to maintain and scale.
 
I still pick Laravel when there’s a real backend behind it, mostly because queues, notifications, scheduler and admin stuff save time. But for anything traffic-facing like rotators, prelanders, pixel fires, cloaking checks etc, I dont want a whole framework waking up on every hit. Small PHP file, nginx, maybe sqlite/redis if needed, and done. Speed is nice, but the real priority for me is less stuff to maintain when you forget the project exists for 8 months.
 
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