Lumen vs Phalcon: What are the differences?

What is Lumen? The stunningly fast PHP micro-framework by Laravel. Laravel Lumen is a stunningly fast PHP micro-framework for building web applications with expressive, elegant syntax. We believe development must be an enjoyable, creative experience to be truly fulfilling. Lumen attempts to take the pain out of development by easing common tasks used in the majority of web projects, such as routing, database abstraction, queueing, and caching.

What is Phalcon? Web framework delivered as a C-extension for PHP. Phalcon is a web framework implemented as a C extension offering high performance and lower resource consumption.

Lumen can be classified as a tool in the "Microframeworks (Backend)" category, while Phalcon is grouped under "Frameworks (Full Stack)".

"API" is the primary reason why developers consider Lumen over the competitors, whereas "Fast" was stated as the key factor in picking Phalcon.

Lumen and Phalcon are both open source tools. It seems that Phalcon with 9.71K GitHub stars and 1.77K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Lumen with 6.29K GitHub stars and 833 GitHub forks.

According to the StackShare community, Lumen has a broader approval, being mentioned in 24 company stacks & 24 developers stacks; compared to Phalcon, which is listed in 28 company stacks and 13 developer stacks.