Kohana vs Zend Framework: What are the differences?

Developers describe Kohana as "An elegant HMVC PHP5 framework". Kohana is an elegant, open source, and object oriented HMVC framework built using PHP5, by a team of volunteers. It aims to be swift, secure, and small. On the other hand, Zend Framework is detailed as "An open source, object-oriented web application framework implemented in PHP 5". Zend Framework 2 is an open source framework for developing web applications and services using PHP 5.3+. Zend Framework 2 uses 100% object-oriented code and utilises most of the new features of PHP 5.3, namely namespaces, late static binding, lambda functions and closures.

Kohana and Zend Framework can be categorized as "Frameworks (Full Stack)" tools.

"Open source" is the primary reason why developers consider Kohana over the competitors, whereas "Open source" was stated as the key factor in picking Zend Framework.

Kohana and Zend Framework are both open source tools. It seems that Zend Framework with 5.71K GitHub stars and 2.87K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Kohana with 1.61K GitHub stars and 464 GitHub forks.

According to the StackShare community, Zend Framework has a broader approval, being mentioned in 40 company stacks & 22 developers stacks; compared to Kohana, which is listed in 3 company stacks and 3 developer stacks.