PHP, which stands for Hypertext Preprocessor, is a server-side scripting language which is used for building dynamic websites and applications. It is the most popular server-side language, which provides an ability to build secure, sophisticated, and exclusive web applications very quickly. It is the language of choice for many web developers, when it comes to creating dynamic web solutions. You can hire PHP developer to create outstanding web applications for your business.
Moreover, the value of PHP is even higher with its frameworks for web development that simplify and expedite PHP coding. PHP frameworks come in different shapes and sizes and cater different developers with varied level of experience, hosting capabilities, application needs and development timeframes.
Often developers have to write the same lines of code again and again also they have to build all sorts of solutions from simple to complex. PHP frameworks help developers remove the monotonous work and build PHP web development solutions very quickly. Plus, they also reduce the complexity of coding to a significant extent. Therefore, developers use varied frameworks to develop PHP solutions.
There are dozens of PHP frameworks to choose from and each come with excellent features to create quality PHP code. In this post, we will take a view of the top 10 PHP frameworks that are very popular in 2019 and widely utilized for creating web development solutions.
1. Symfony
Symfony has been here for a long time and it’s one of the most popular PHP frameworks used for developing high-end web applications. It provides developers with several reusable PHP code and components. It is a perfect choice when it comes to developing large-scale enterprise solutions.
Symfony’s development team provides training courses in different languages and they also update their blogs regularly in order to keep the large community engaged with them. It is widely used by developers due to its advanced features and easy to use environment.
The reusable PHP libraries are used by Symfony components which simplify many web development chores like object configuration, form creation, routing authentication, templating and more. Moreover, this framework has a steep learning curve due to a large number of features it offers. Nevertheless, the growing community and many unofficial support groups helps learning and getting familiar with Symfony easily.
Why choose Symfony?
- It offers more bundles than any other framework.
- It is laden with excellent features.
- This offers long-term support releases.
- Official training courses are available.
2. CakePHP
CakePHP is an ideal PHP framework for beginners, and it is good for developing commercial web solutions rapidly. It offers scaffolding functionality and code generation, which helps speeding up the development process and provides lots of packages to handle common functionality.
CakePHP is free to use whether it’s for commercial or personal use. It has been used by brands to build varied web solutions. It has a unique MVC conventions that provide guidance for the development process.
It is also very easy to configure this framework as it eliminates the requirement for complicated YAML or XML configuration files. You can build project quickly with this framework and it offers security features that prevent threats like CSRF, XSS, SQL injects, and also provide form validation tools.
There are a lot of active support documents to learn and get familiar with CakePHP. Plus, there are many help portals to get started for beginners.
Why choose CakePHP?
- Easy configuration.
- In-built validation.
- Support for AJAX.
- Easy to extend with additional components and plugins.
3. Zend Framework
Zend Framework is quite a popular PHP framework as it is known as a go-to professional framework used for building high-performance applications. It is widely used for building professional enterprise-level web applications. This framework is designed with extensibility, performance, and security in mind.
There is a very long list of features that Zend Framework provides to its users like components for forms, feeds, services, authentication, etc, front-end supported drag-and-drop editor, crytogaphic coding tool, PHP unit testing tool and more. Zend is also associated with giant tech companies like Google IBM, Microsoft, etc.
Why choose Zend Framework?
- It has a huge developers community.
- It is a great tool that supports front-end technology.
- This supports AJAX.
- It supports third-party component.
4. CodeIgniter
It is a lightweight and a robust PHP framework, which helps developing high-end web applications. CodeIgniter comes with several advanced features and enables the developers to build web solutions quickly and smoothly. It comprises a library that offers a simple interface which requires a logical structure for accessing its features. It is preferred by many developers as it offers to build creative solutions with the minimal use of coding.
Creating full-fledged web applications with CodeIgniter is a breeze as it has a small learning curve and several useful libraries. There is a very huge and helpful community out there for CodeIgniter. Plus, there is also a lot of documentation to learn and get familiar with this framework.
CodeIgniter is backed by The British Columbia Institute of Technology, which ensures its constant growth and evolution. It offers extensive features, which include form validation, unit testing, email sessions and more. In case, you don’t find a library for a certain task, you can also build your own and share it with the community too.
Why choose CodeIgniter
- It offers in-built security tools.
- It’s a good framework that requires a little coding.
- There are lots of tools available in a single package.
- Build high-performance web apps.
5. Yii 2
It is the oldest PHP framework, which isn’t backed a company instead a large number of international developers provide support for Yii 2. It is a competitor for Symfony 2 and has a easier learning curve. It has several outstanding features and it is preferred when developers need to create solutions that offer fast results.
Yii2 has a good design, which enables it to work with AJAX and supports powerful caching. It enables the developers to transform database data into objects and helps avoiding the complexity of writing SQL queries repeatedly. Yii 2 allows creating efficient, easily maintainable, and extensible web applications.
Why choose Yii 2?
- It is developed and backed by a large community of developers.
- It is an effective tool for handling errors.
- Easy integration with third-party components.
- It provides support for AJAX.
6. Phalcon
It is very different from other PHP frameworks because it has a different coding style which is based on C/C++. However, it provides advanced and outstanding features to develop high-end web applications. There are a lot of exceptional features offered by Phalcon which include universal autoloader, caching, asset management and more.
Phalcon is very easy and can be understood quickly. With the detailed documentations available for Phalcon helps developers to build the PHP platform more easily and quickly. In comparison to other frameworks, it use minimal amount of resources, which results in fast HTTP requests, so it’s blazing fast.
It offers powerful components like MVC, ORM, auto-loading and caching and it provides data storage tools due to its own SQL language, which is PHQL. Apart from this, it also offers Object Document Mapping for MongoDB. There are many features like form builders, international language support, Template engines, and provide ease of building web applications. It is useful for building full-fledged web applications or high-performing REST APIs.
Why choose Phalcon?
- It is easy to install and useful for developing customizable web applications stand up to the mark to enterprise guidelines.
- Important features include a universal autoloader, top security, asset management, increased execution speed, and caching.
- As a compared to other frameworks, Phalcon is good at optimizing performance because of efficient memory utilization. You can create a blazing fast website with it.
- It is written on C-extension.
- It is a developer friendly framework.
7. FuelPHP
It is a modern, extensible, sophisticated and highly modular PHP framework which supports MVC (Model-View-Controller). FuelPHP is built on the HMVC (Hierarchical Model-View-Controller) architecture which is the enhanced version of MVC. It has many exciting features such as powerful and lightweight support for ORM, security enhancements, template parsing, authentication framework and several other packages to extend developers’ capabilities.
With its extensive security features which address a major number of security issues of the applications, developers can create highly secure solutions for their clients. There are several robust features like output encoding, URL filtering, and more that enable to build secure web applications. Due to its own authentication framework, FuelPHP is widely utilized for creating end-to-end web solutions.
Why choose FuelPHP?
- This framework allows the developers to build and deliver end-to-end solutions with any size and scale of complexity.
- Key features of FuelPHP are a routing system, a caching system, RESTful implementation, HMVC implementation, and vulnerability protection.
- It provides security beyond the basic security features, which make it an ideal option for your project if security is a concern. However, it presents less support and may have steeper learning curve because it’s relatively new.
- It supports advanced MVC features.
- Ideal for developing high performance apps.
- It offers topmost security.
8. Laravel
Laravel is the king of all PHP frameworks. If you want to develop beautiful and outstanding web applications, you can rely on Laravel. It is a go-to PHP framework which is widely used by web artisans to develop topmost solutions. The reason for why Laravel is so special lies in its wide popularity and ease of use as it doesn’t virtually have a learning curve.
This framework is utilized by developers to complete different types of serious projects. At first, this framework might seem a simple tool, but it’s really a complete solution for all kinds of concrete projects.
It comes with a lot of built-in features which offer rapid development and simplify coding. Besides this, it also comes with it’s own templating engine Blade, advanced RESTful routing system, local development environment, Homestead and tons of other features. It supports MVC architecture and offer a packaging system, ORM, unit testing and more.
With Queue management, it handles task in the background and logs activity when tasks are running in the font-end. The built-in Composer into Laravel makes adding packages a breeze. It handles Redis or MongoDB well. It is very popular and there is a lot of documentation and learning resources that are easily found to get familiarized with this framework.
Why choose Laravel?
- It is an easy framework with no considerable learning curve.
- It is preferred by many developers.
- Great training resources.
- It offers a simple testing unit.
- Suitable for developing applications whether small or large with complex back-end requirements.
- It’s very expressive and the security and speed of this framework are as per the expectations for modern web applications. It is the tool to choose for developing scalable and powerful enterprise web applications.
9. Slim Framework
With its enhanced features, Slim Framework enables you to build advanced web applications. This framework is quite popular among developers for building APIs as it offers easy steps to create desired APIs. As a micro PHP framework, it’s very lightweight and used for developing small web solutions. This framework is widely utilized for creating RESTful APIs and various web services. It offers a lot of excellent features like encryption, URL routing, cookie, sessions and more.
Why choose Slim Framework?
- It is best for developing small web solutions with great features.
- There is well prepared documentation and resources to learn the framework.
- Offers add-ons like flash, HTTP caching etc.
- Ideal for creating RESTful APIs.
10. PHPixie
It’s a full stack PHP framework which is used for creating high performance web applications. It supports HMVC and built with individual components. A community is there which looks after the regular updates of the framework. It is easy to get started with, it is modularized and compiles fast.
Why choose PHPixie
- You can choose PHPixie if you want a framework that is easy to understand and work with.
- It supports HMVC architecture.
- It’s lightweight tool and with support for MongoDB.
- It offers an excellent routing system.
Final thought
PHP is a robust language for developing dynamic applications. Coding in PHP becomes even easier and efficient with PHP frameworks. You can easily hire PHP developer to work on your favorite PHP framework to develop the desired solution. However, choosing the right framework is crucial to build the correct solutions. It depends on the needs and requirements of your project what type of framework you choose to develop the desired solution. We have mentioned the top 10 PHP frameworks in this post, you can review them to find out which one of them fit your requirements, then choose any of the frameworks. You can also consult the best PHP web development company to get assistance for choosing the right PHP framework.
