15 Best and Most Popular PHP Frameworks

PHP is one of the most popular server side scripting language which is being used by developers all over the world widely. PHP provides myriad of functions and features to accomplish the tasks quickly and with less or no efforts.

A framework is software which wraps up many libraries and files in a bundle, which helps developers designing and developing dynamic websites quickly and efficiently.

There are myriad of PHP Frameworks available in the market but only few are dominating the entire PHP world by providing remarkable features and functions to their users. Frameworks like Laravel, Symfony, Phalcon, Zend Framework, and Codeigniter are on top of the chart and managed to have more users than any other frameworks in comparison.

We conduct a search and explored various sites and surveys and prepared a list of 15 Best and Popular PHP Frameworks which developers have been using for their development tasks. In this article we have chosen and put these frameworks according to the usage and popularity they have gained amongst developers.

Every framework has its own advantages as well as disadvantages, so if you have a preferred Framework by which you work with aside from the ones listed here, please do let us know by dropping us your feedback in the comment section below we would love to hear your feedback.

So, what you are waiting for, let’s explore the list.

1. Laravel

Laravel is free, open source PHP framework committed to elegance and simplicity that helps you create wonderful applications using simple, expressive syntax. Laravel helps you create wonderful applications using simple, expressive syntax, aiming to take the pain out of web development by easing common tasks, such as authentication, routing, sessions and caching. Laravel is well readable and well-documented that helps you speed up your coding. Laravel makes development easy and more creative for developers and lets them produce some outstanding result with it.

2. Symfony

Symfony is a web application framework; symfony follows the model-view-controller (MVC) system and getting more popular day by day. Symfony is a free framework under the MIT license, Symfony has made development easy with the help of library which comprises of many PHP code classes.

3. Nette

Nette Framework is a modern PHP framework with revolutionary security, an object-oriented design, exceptional performance, and an easy learning curve. Nette uses revolutionary technology that eliminates security holes and their misuse, such as XSS, CSRF, session hijacking, session fixation, etc. It possesses unmatched debug tools, which will help you discover all bugs in timely fashion. Nette is a modern framework, featuring AJAX / AJAJ, Dependency Injection, SEO,DRY, KISS , MVC, Web 2.0, cool URL – a sophisticated support for all advanced technologies and concepts.

4. CodeIgniter

CodeIgniter is a powerful PHP framework with a very small footprint, built for PHP coders who need a simple and elegant toolkit to create full-featured web applications. Its goal is to enable you to develop projects much faster than you could if you were writing code from scratch, by providing a rich set of libraries for commonly needed tasks, as well as a simple interface and logical structure to access these libraries. CodeIgniter lets you creatively focus on your project by minimizing the amount of code needed for a given task.

5. Yii

Yii is a secure, professional, and fast PHP framework. It only loads the features you need; includes input validation, output filtering, and other security features; and helps you develop clean, readable code. Yii Comes with rich features: MVC, DAO/ActiveRecord, I18N, caching, authentication and role-based access control, scaffolding, testing, open source, high performing, object oriented, database access object, easy form validation, default support for web services and many more.

6. Zend Framework

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. Zend Framework 2 evolved from Zend Framework 1, a successful PHP framework with over 15 million downloads.

7. CakePHP

CakePHP has released a stable version 3.0 to the public. CakePHP makes building web applications easier, faster, and requires less code. It uses the usual design patterns like MVC and ORM within the convention over configuration paradigm that helps lower development expenses and does not need the developers to write a lot of code. It enabled to use code generation and scaffolding features to rapidly build prototypes. No additional XML or YAML file configuration is required, just setup your database and you are ready to bake. CakePHP is licensed under the MIT license which makes it perfect for use in common applications.

8. Phalcon

Phalcon PHP is a web framework delivered as a C extension providing high performance and lower resource consumption. Phalcon PHP is written in C with platform independence in mind. As a result, Phalcon PHP is available on Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, You can either download a binary package for the system of your choice or build it from sources.

9. PHPixie

PHPixie is a lightweight PHP MVC framework designed to be fast, easy to learn and provide a solid foundation for development. It is very lightweight, well documented, and it makes a lot of use of naming convention so you will need to configure as little as possible. PHPixie employs a simplistic implementation of the request-response flow yet still enables the use of more complex architectures such as HMVC

10. Slim Framework

Slim is a PHP micro framework that helps you quickly write simple yet powerful web applications and APIs. It features a powerful router, template rendering with custom views, flash messages, secure cookies with AES-256 encryption, HTTP caching, logging with custom log writers, error handling and debugging, simple configuration.

11. Fuel PHP

Fuel is a simple, flexible, community driven PHP 5.3 web framework based on the best ideas of other frameworks with a fresh start. Fuel has been tested on Apache, IIS and Nginx. Fuel takes a different approach to many frameworks and strives to be community-driven. They have only been going for less than 6 months and already had 30 developers commit to the source code and documentation.

12. Kohana

allows to build web applications quickly, as it has many common components included, as translation tools, database access, code profiling, encryption, validation, and more. It also has good debugging and profiling tools which helps to solve any occurring problems, which often is very time-consuming without the right tools.

13. Typo3

TYPO3 Flow is a web application platform enabling developers creating excellent web solutions and bring back the joy of coding. It gives you fast results. It is a reliable foundation for complex applications. And it is backed by one of the biggest PHP communities – TYPO3.

14. Simple MVC Framework

Simple MVC Framework is designed to be extremely easy to set up, have clean coding structure and easy to learn. The framework can be setup just by setting the site path. It features simple theme files, as well as full control over views themes can be used to quickly change the look of your application/website. MySQL is provided using a PDO helper, of course this can be swapped to MySQLI, Medoo or another database engine.

15. Aura

The Aura PHP Project is built for those who love clean code, fully decoupled libraries, and truly independent packages. This framework has quite a lot of users, is quite similarly used to CakePHP. Download a single package and start using it in your project today, with no added dependencies. The primary goal of Aura is to provide high-quality, well-tested, standards-compliant, decoupled libraries that can be used in any code base.