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. Spring-Boot vs Symfony

Spring-Boot vs Symfony

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Symfony
Symfony
Stacks8.5K
Followers6.2K
Votes1.1K
GitHub Stars30.7K
Forks9.7K
Spring Boot
Spring Boot
Stacks26.7K
Followers24.3K
Votes1.0K
GitHub Stars78.9K
Forks41.6K

Spring-Boot vs Symfony: What are the differences?

  1. 1. Scalability and Performance: Spring Boot is known for its scalability and performance. It uses lightweight and non-blocking architectures, allowing applications to handle a large number of concurrent requests efficiently. On the other hand, Symfony is not as lightweight as Spring Boot and may require additional configurations and optimizations to achieve similar scalability and performance levels.

  2. 2. Language and Community: Spring Boot is primarily developed and supported by the Java community, which has a large and active user base. It benefits from the extensive Java ecosystem, including libraries, frameworks, and tooling. Symfony, on the other hand, is built on top of PHP, which also has a significant community but is not as extensive as Java's. The choice between the two depends on the expertise and preferences of the development team.

  3. 3. Configuration and Convention over Configuration: Spring Boot follows the principle of convention over configuration, providing sensible defaults and reducing the need for explicit configurations. It enables developers to quickly bootstrap applications by automating common tasks. Symfony, on the other hand, leans towards explicit configuration, allowing developers to have full control over the application's behavior but requiring more manual setup and configuration.

  4. 4. Dependency Injection: Spring Boot has a powerful dependency injection mechanism integrated into its core framework. It simplifies the management of object dependencies and promotes loose coupling. Symfony also utilizes dependency injection, but it requires additional configuration and setup to achieve similar functionality as Spring Boot.

  5. 5. Templating and Frontend: Symfony has a built-in templating engine called Twig, which provides simplified syntax and powerful features for designing templates. It allows for reusable and maintainable code for frontend development. In contrast, Spring Boot does not come with a built-in templating engine, but it can integrate with various frontend technologies like Thymeleaf, FreeMarker, or React, depending on the developer's preference and requirements.

  6. 6. Database Access and ORM: Spring Boot has robust support for database access through its Spring Data JPA module. It provides an easy-to-use and intuitive API for interacting with relational databases and offers support for various ORM (Object-Relational Mapping) frameworks like Hibernate. Symfony also supports database access through features like Doctrine ORM, but it requires additional configuration and setup compared to Spring Boot.

In Summary, Spring Boot and Symfony differ in terms of scalability and performance, language and community, configuration approaches, dependency injection mechanisms, templating and frontend options, and database access and ORM frameworks.

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 Symfony, Spring Boot

Eva
Eva

Fullstack developer

Jul 28, 2020

Needs adviceonJavaJavaSpring BootSpring BootJavaScriptJavaScript

Hello, I am a fullstack web developer. I have been working for a company with Java/ Spring Boot and client-side JavaScript(mainly jQuery, some AngularJS) for the past 4 years. As I wish to now work as a freelancer, I am faced with a dilemma: which stack to choose given my current knowledge and the state of the market?

I've heard PHP is very popular in the freelance world. I don't know PHP. However, I'm sure it wouldn't be difficult to learn since it has many similarities with Java (OOP). It seems to me that Laravel has similarities with Spring Boot (it's MVC and OOP). Also, people say Laravel works well with Vue.js, which is my favorite JS framework.

On the other hand, I already know the Javascript language, and I like Vue.js, so I figure I could go the fullstack Javascript route with ExpressJS. However, I am not sure if these techs are ripe for freelancing (with regards to RAD, stability, reliability, security, costs, etc.) Is it true that Express is almost always used with MongoDB? Because my experience is mostly with SQL databases.

The projects I would like to work on are custom web applications/websites for small businesses. I have developed custom ERPs before and found that Java was a good fit, except for it taking a long time to develop. I cannot make a choice, and I am constantly switching between trying PHP and Node.js/Express. Any real-world advice would be welcome! I would love to find a stack that I enjoy while doing meaningful freelance coding.

826k views826k
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
Anonymous
Anonymous

Sep 15, 2020

Needs adviceonKotlinKotlinC#C#DjangoDjango

Hi

I’ve been using Django for the last year on and off to do my backend API. I’m getting a bit frustrated with the Django REST framework with the setup of the serializers and Django for the lack of web sockets. I’m considering either Spring or .NET Core. I’m familiar with Kotlin and C# but I’ve not built any substantial projects with them. I like OOP, building a desktop app, web API, and also the potential to get a job in the future or building a tool at work to manage my documents, dashboard and processes point cloud data.

I’m familiar with c/cpp, TypeScript.

I would love your insights on where I should go.

617k views617k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Symfony
Symfony
Spring Boot
Spring Boot

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

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.

Statistics
GitHub Stars
30.7K
GitHub Stars
78.9K
GitHub Forks
9.7K
GitHub Forks
41.6K
Stacks
8.5K
Stacks
26.7K
Followers
6.2K
Followers
24.3K
Votes
1.1K
Votes
1.0K
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
  • 149
    Powerful and handy
  • 134
    Easy setup
  • 128
    Java
  • 90
    Spring
  • 85
    Fast
Cons
  • 23
    Heavy weight
  • 18
    Annotation ceremony
  • 13
    Java
  • 11
    Many config files needed
  • 5
    Reactive
Integrations
CakePHP
CakePHP
PHP
PHP
ReactPHP
ReactPHP
Spring
Spring
Java
Java

What are some alternatives to Symfony, Spring Boot?

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.

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.

MEAN

MEAN

MEAN (Mongo, Express, Angular, Node) is a boilerplate that provides a nice starting point for MongoDB, Node.js, Express, and AngularJS based applications. It is designed to give you a quick and organized way to start developing MEAN based web apps with useful modules like Mongoose and Passport pre-bundled and configured.

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