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  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
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  4. Frameworks
  5. NestJS vs Symfony

NestJS vs Symfony

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Symfony
Symfony
Stacks8.5K
Followers6.2K
Votes1.1K
GitHub Stars30.7K
Forks9.7K
NestJS
NestJS
Stacks2.7K
Followers3.0K
Votes326
GitHub Stars73.3K
Forks8.1K

NestJS vs Symfony: What are the differences?

Key Differences between NestJS and Symfony

NestJS and Symfony are both popular frameworks used for building web applications. While they share similarities in terms of their MVC architecture and support for various features, there are several key differences between them. Here are the top 6 differences:

  1. Language: NestJS is primarily focused on building applications using TypeScript, a superset of JavaScript that adds static typing and other features. On the other hand, Symfony is built on PHP, a popular server-side scripting language.

  2. Architecture: NestJS follows a modular architecture, allowing developers to organize their code into separate modules and reuse them across different parts of the application. Symfony, on the other hand, follows a component-based architecture, where reusable libraries (components) are used to build applications.

  3. Community and Ecosystem: Symfony has a larger and more established community compared to NestJS. This means that Symfony has a wider range of libraries, plugins, and community support available, making it easier for developers to find solutions to their problems. NestJS, being a relatively newer framework, has a smaller but growing community and ecosystem.

  4. Performance: NestJS, being built on top of Node.js, offers excellent performance and efficiency for high-traffic applications. Symfony, being built on PHP, also provides good performance but may require additional optimizations in certain cases.

  5. Testing: NestJS places a strong emphasis on unit testing and provides built-in support for testing using popular testing frameworks like Jest. Symfony, on the other hand, also supports testing but does not have the same level of built-in testing capabilities as NestJS.

  6. Scalability: NestJS, with its scalable architecture and support for microservices, is well-suited for building scalable applications that can handle heavy loads. Symfony, while also capable of building scalable applications, may require additional configurations and optimizations for high-scalability scenarios.

In summary, NestJS and Symfony differ in terms of the language they use, their architecture, community and ecosystem support, performance, testing capabilities, and scalability.

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Advice on Symfony, NestJS

juan9222
juan9222

Jul 25, 2020

Needs advice

Hi there, I'm deciding the technology to use in my project.

I need to build software that has:

  • Login
  • Register
  • Main View (access to a user account, News, General Info, Business hours, software, and parts section).
  • Account Preferences.
  • Web Shop for Parts (Support, Download Sections, Ticket System).

The most critical functionality is a WebSocket that connects between a car that sends real-time data through serial communication, and a server performs diagnosis on the car and sends the results back to the user.

616k views616k
Comments
Louai
Louai

Full Stack Web Developer

May 15, 2020

Needs adviceonNode.jsNode.jsTypeScriptTypeScriptExpressJSExpressJS

I'm planning with a small team to create an application which is a platform for restaurants. I'm on the backend almost alone currently. I'm going to use Node.js for that, and I'm very fond of TypeScript, and I worked before mostly with ExpressJS. The team may get bigger as the application becomes bigger and more successful, so I have the Scalability concern in mind now, and I was considering these options:

  1. Use Node+Express+Typescript
  2. Use Node+NestJs (which utilizes Typescript by default)

Option 2 is enticing to me because recently I came to love NestJS and it provides more scalability for the project and uses Typescript in the best way and uses Express under the hood. Also I come from an Angular 2 background, which I think is the best frontend framework (my opinion, and I know React quite well), which makes Nest feel familiar to me because of the similarity between Nest and Angular. Option 1 on the other hand uses Express which is a minimalist framework, very popular one, but it doesn't provide the same scalability and brings decision fatigue about what to combine with it and may not utilize Typescript in the best way. Yet, on the other hand, it is flexible and it may be easier to manipulate things in different ways with it. Another very important thing is that it would be easier in my view to hire Node developers with skills in Express than NestJs. The majority of Node developers are much more familiar with JavaScript and Express.

What is your advice and why? I would love to hear especially from developers who worked on both Express and Nest

549k views549k
Comments
Slimane
Slimane

Jul 9, 2020

Needs adviceonSpring BootSpring BootNestJSNestJSNode.jsNode.js

I am currently planning to build a project from scratch. I will be using Angular as front-end framework, but for the back-end I am not sure which framework to use between Spring Boot and NestJS. I have worked with Spring Boot before, but my new project contains a lot of I/O operations, in fact it will show a daily report. I thought about the new Spring Web Reactive Framework but given the idea that Node.js is the most popular on handling non blocking I/O I am planning to start learning NestJS since it is based on Angular philosophy and TypeScript which I am familiar with. Looking forward to hear from you dear Community.

917k views917k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Symfony
Symfony
NestJS
NestJS

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

Nest is a framework for building efficient, scalable Node.js server-side applications. It uses progressive JavaScript, is built with TypeScript (preserves compatibility with pure JavaScript) and combines elements of OOP (Object Oriented Programming), FP (Functional Programming), and FRP (Functional Reactive Programming). Under the hood, Nest makes use of Express, but also, provides compatibility with a wide range of other libraries, like e.g. Fastify, allowing for easy use of the myriad third-party plugins which are available.

-
Extensible - Gives you true flexibility by allowing use of any other libraries thanks to modular architecture.; Versatile - An adaptable ecosystem that is a fully-fledged backbone for all kinds of server-side applications.; Progressive - Takes advantage of latest JavaScript features, bringing design patterns and mature solutions to node.js world.
Statistics
GitHub Stars
30.7K
GitHub Stars
73.3K
GitHub Forks
9.7K
GitHub Forks
8.1K
Stacks
8.5K
Stacks
2.7K
Followers
6.2K
Followers
3.0K
Votes
1.1K
Votes
326
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 177
    Open source
  • 149
    Php
  • 130
    Community
  • 129
    Dependency injection
  • 122
    Professional
Cons
  • 10
    Too many dependency
  • 8
    Lot of config files
  • 4
    YMAL
  • 3
    Feature creep
  • 1
    Bloated
Pros
  • 54
    Powerful but super friendly to work with
  • 42
    Fast development
  • 40
    Easy to understand documentation
  • 36
    Angular style syntax for the backend
  • 32
    NodeJS ecosystem
Cons
  • 10
    Difficult to debug
  • 10
    User base is small. Less help on Stackoverflow
  • 5
    Angular-like architecture
  • 3
    Javascript
  • 3
    Updates with breaking changes
Integrations
CakePHP
CakePHP
PHP
PHP
ReactPHP
ReactPHP
No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Symfony, NestJS?

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.

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.

Phoenix Framework

Phoenix Framework

Phoenix is a framework for building HTML5 apps, API backends and distributed systems. Written in Elixir, you get beautiful syntax, productive tooling and a fast runtime.

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