StackShareStackShare
Follow on
StackShare

Discover and share technology stacks from companies around the world.

Follow on

© 2025 StackShare. All rights reserved.

Product

  • Stacks
  • Tools
  • Feed

Company

  • About
  • Contact

Legal

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Frameworks
  4. Frameworks
  5. Grails vs Yii

Grails vs Yii

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Grails
Grails
Stacks384
Followers373
Votes333
Yii
Yii
Stacks702
Followers386
Votes311
GitHub Stars4.8K
Forks2.2K

Grails vs Yii: What are the differences?

Grails: An Open Source, full stack, web application framework for the JVM. Grails is a framework used to build web applications with the Groovy programming language. The core framework is very extensible and there are numerous plugins available that provide easy integration of add-on features; Yii: A high-performance PHP framework best for developing Web 2.0 applications. Yii comes with: MVC, DAO/ActiveRecord, I18N/L10N, caching, authentication and role-based access control, scaffolding, testing, etc. It can reduce your development time significantly.

Grails and Yii can be primarily classified as "Frameworks (Full Stack)" tools.

"Groovy" is the primary reason why developers consider Grails over the competitors, whereas "Open source" was stated as the key factor in picking Yii.

Grails and Yii are both open source tools. Yii with 4.86K GitHub stars and 2.22K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Grails with 2.48K GitHub stars and 945 GitHub forks.

According to the StackShare community, Yii has a broader approval, being mentioned in 58 company stacks & 32 developers stacks; compared to Grails, which is listed in 47 company stacks and 22 developer stacks.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs
CLI (Node.js)
or
Manual

Advice on Grails, Yii

Dalton
Dalton

Nov 8, 2020

Decided

This website was originally written in Yii as PHP was my main language back then. After learning Django, I realized just how quickly you could build a web app with less lines. So I migrated my website to Django in a week or two and managed to cut down the lines of code by half. Some of the lines saving came from the models, the views, and the expressiveness of Python. Django requires like config for the models and they provide many generic views that abstracts away common patterns.

248k views248k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Grails
Grails
Yii
Yii

Grails is a framework used to build web applications with the Groovy programming language. The core framework is very extensible and there are numerous plugins available that provide easy integration of add-on features.

Yii comes with: MVC, DAO/ActiveRecord, I18N/L10N, caching, authentication and role-based access control, scaffolding, testing, etc. It can reduce your development time significantly.

FLAT LEARNING CURVE; ON TOP OF SPRING BOOT; SMOOTH JAVA INTEGRATION; REST APIS, REACT, ANGULAR
-
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
4.8K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
2.2K
Stacks
384
Stacks
702
Followers
373
Followers
386
Votes
333
Votes
311
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 56
    Groovy
  • 40
    Jvm
  • 38
    Rapid development
  • 37
    Gorm
  • 30
    Web framework
Cons
  • 3
    Frequent breaking changes
  • 2
    Undocumented features
Pros
  • 42
    Open source
  • 33
    Code generator
  • 33
    Simple
  • 29
    Active record
  • 26
    Full featured
Cons
  • 2
    Unnatural love of arrays
  • 1
    Promotes spagetti code
  • 1
    Promotes bad practice
  • 1
    Too Opinionated
Integrations
Sublime Text
Sublime Text
IntelliJ IDEA
IntelliJ IDEA
Eclipse
Eclipse
Java
Java
Spring Boot
Spring Boot
React
React
TextMate
TextMate
AngularJS
AngularJS
Groovy
Groovy
PHP
PHP

What are some alternatives to Grails, Yii?

Node.js

Node.js

Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices.

Rails

Rails

Rails is a web-application framework that includes everything needed to create database-backed web applications according to the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern.

Django

Django

Django is a high-level Python Web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design.

Laravel

Laravel

It is a web application framework with expressive, elegant syntax. It attempts to take the pain out of development by easing common tasks used in the majority of web projects, such as authentication, routing, sessions, and caching.

.NET

.NET

.NET is a general purpose development platform. With .NET, you can use multiple languages, editors, and libraries to build native applications for web, mobile, desktop, gaming, and IoT for Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and more.

ASP.NET Core

ASP.NET Core

A free and open-source web framework, and higher performance than ASP.NET, developed by Microsoft and the community. It is a modular framework that runs on both the full .NET Framework, on Windows, and the cross-platform .NET Core.

Symfony

Symfony

It is written with speed and flexibility in mind. It allows developers to build better and easy to maintain websites with PHP..

Spring

Spring

A key element of Spring is infrastructural support at the application level: Spring focuses on the "plumbing" of enterprise applications so that teams can focus on application-level business logic, without unnecessary ties to specific deployment environments.

Spring Boot

Spring Boot

Spring Boot makes it easy to create stand-alone, production-grade Spring based Applications that you can "just run". We take an opinionated view of the Spring platform and third-party libraries so you can get started with minimum fuss. Most Spring Boot applications need very little Spring configuration.

Android SDK

Android SDK

Android provides a rich application framework that allows you to build innovative apps and games for mobile devices in a Java language environment.

Related Comparisons

Bootstrap
Materialize

Bootstrap vs Materialize

Laravel
Django

Django vs Laravel vs Node.js

Bootstrap
Foundation

Bootstrap vs Foundation vs Material UI

Node.js
Spring Boot

Node.js vs Spring-Boot

Liquibase
Flyway

Flyway vs Liquibase