Symfony vs Zend Framework

Overview

Symfony

Stacks8.5K

Followers6.2K

Votes1.1K

GitHub Stars30.7K

Forks9.7K

Zend Framework

Stacks262

Followers215

Votes48

Symfony vs Zend Framework: What are the differences?

Developers describe Symfony as "A PHP full-stack web framework". Symfony is written with speed and flexibility in mind. It allows developers to build better and easy to maintain websites with PHP. Symfony can be used to develop all kind of websites, from your personal blog to high traffic ones like Dailymotion or Yahoo! Answers. 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.

Symfony and Zend Framework belong to "Frameworks (Full Stack)" category of the tech stack.

"Open source" is the top reason why over 154 developers like Symfony, while over 22 developers mention "Open source" as the leading cause for choosing Zend Framework.

Symfony and Zend Framework are both open source tools. It seems that Symfony with 21.1K GitHub stars and 7.01K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Zend Framework with 5.71K GitHub stars and 2.87K GitHub forks.

eTobb, Improvely, and Chooos are some of the popular companies that use Symfony, whereas Zend Framework is used by Webedia, Scandlearn, and MV Labs. Symfony has a broader approval, being mentioned in 374 company stacks & 277 developers stacks; compared to Zend Framework, which is listed in 40 company stacks and 22 developer stacks.

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Advice on Symfony, Zend Framework

Danilo

Senior Software Engineer at WeRoad

Dec 14, 2021

Decided

For a full-stack app or just simple APIs I'd go 100% with Laravel. You get a clean architecture, beautiful documentation and friendly and always growing community: the project is yours, from A to Z. With their docs and resources like Laracast you can start from zero and build what you want, when you want. The learning curve is definitely smaller when compared to Symfony and, with the help of a bit of "magic" (Facades etc.) you get the same results in the half of the time with cleaner code.

105k views105k

Comments

Quade

DevOps Engineer

Jun 27, 2022

Needs adviceon

Django

Python

Symfony

Hi everyone! I'm starting a personal project that I've been postponing for a little while and I need a bit of advice. I thought that it will be a bit of a challenge but I figure the best way to learn is by doing!

The plan is to build an app with loads of automation build in for reporting which would make it very easy to perform tasks, The plan is to build something similar to an HR app using microservice architecture, separating services e.g. employee data, payroll (including calculations based on easily entered info like tax %), employee services (vacation, sick day allowance booking and tabulation) and automated reporting on a pre-defined schedule (bi-weekly, monthly).

I am considering Django (as I currently know a bit of Python) and Symfony (as a friend who is a developer recommended it) but I am well aware there are other (and probably better) tools out there for the job (like maybe ExpressJS/Node.js for the backend and React/Vue.js for the front).

Background:

I have got knowledge as a DevOps, Site Reliability and Cloud engineer so once the app is built I'm very comfortable taking it to deployment.

Thank you all for your help and responses.

72.4k views72.4k

Comments

Fabian

May 5, 2020

Needs adviceon

GraphQL

C++

Symfony

I'm about to begin working on an API, for which I plan to add GraphQL connectivity for processing data. The data processed will mainly be audio files being downloaded/uploaded with some user messaging & authentication.

I don't mind the difficulty in any service since I've used C++ (for data structures & algorithms at least) and would also say I am patient and can learn fairly quickly. My main concerns would be their performance, libraries/community, and job marketability.

Why I'm stuck between these three...

Symfony: I've programmed in PHP for back-end in a previous internship and may do so again in a few months.

Node.js: It's newer than PHP, and it's JavaScript where my front-end stack will be React and (likely) React Native.

Golang: It's newer than PHP, I've heard of its good performance, and it would be nice to learn a new (growing) language.

2.4M views2.4M

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Symfony	Zend Framework
It is written with speed and flexibility in mind. It allows developers to build better and easy to maintain websites with PHP..	It is an open source framework for developing web applications and services using PHP 5.3+. It uses 100% object-oriented code and utilizes most of the new features of namely namespaces, late static binding, lambda functions and closures.
-	Pure object oriented web application framework; Advanced MVC implementation; Supports multi databases including PostgreSQL, SQLite etc; Simple cloud API; Session management; Data encryption; Flexible URI Routing; Zend provides RESTful API development support.
Statistics
GitHub Stars 30.7K	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 9.7K	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 8.5K	Stacks 262
Followers 6.2K	Followers 215
Votes 1.1K	Votes 48
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 25 Open source 11 Community 4 Fast 3 Scalable 2 Many library
Integrations
CakePHP PHP ReactPHP	Expressive PHP GitHub Webex

What are some alternatives to Symfony, Zend Framework?

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

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 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

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

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 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 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 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.

Related Comparisons

"Open source" is the top reason why over 154 developers like Symfony, while over 22 developers mention "Open source" as the leading cause for choosing Zend Framework.

Symfony vs Zend Framework