10 Popular PHP Frameworks to Look In 2022

The tech world is surrounded by programming languages and we, living in the 20th century, are witnessing a historic transformation. Well, you all know the role of programming languages in the development of websites and mobile applications that are being used by billions of people in their daily works.

Therefore, the demand for these languages among developers is increasing over time. In this article, we are going to discuss one of the widely used scripting languages and its frameworks which has covered almost 80% of the website market of the tech world- named as PHP frameworks.

Here Is a Brief Introduction about PHP

PHP, or hypertext pre-processor, is an open-source server-side scripting language that is used for developing websites and web apps. It’s the world’s most popular language till the date of which PHP developers across the world are making use. PHP simplifies the complex process of development by providing a platform where the developers can easily build PHP applications in the shortest time possible.

What Makes PHP and Its Frameworks So Popular?

PHP is the most famous server-side scripting language which helps developers build static and dynamic websites in less time. This language provides a number of features that is why developers across the world choose PHP and its frameworks to their alternatives like Ruby and Python. Some of the reasons that make PHP and its frameworks so popular.

Speed

PHP development frameworks provide advanced tools, features and code snippets that help developers and speed up the overall development process. Thus websites made by using PHP frameworks are very responsive and have fast loading speeds.

Cross-Platform

Cross-platform development has long been the holy grail of building web applications. PHP frameworks help you build cross-platform web apps that can be run on any web browser operating system or device.

Greater Database Diversity

There are certain PHP frameworks that can be used with different databases. Some use object-relational mapping to allow operations across different databases that don’t need the complicated SQL codes.

Scalability

PHP developers all over the world use PHP frameworks to develop highly scalable websites. PHP and its frameworks provide developers with the right tools to achieve great scalability, performance, and reliability with less effort in configurations and server maintenance.

Supports CMS

Successful applications across all platforms use the content management system for better separation and presentation of digital data PHP frameworks also support CMS, and it is actually the language mostly use for CMS development.

Top 10 popular PHP Frameworks

Here’s a list of the top PHP frameworks, based on popularity, usability and ability to make web application development smoother.

Laravel

It is one of the most popular PHP frameworks that was introduced in 2011. This framework is best for complex and robust website application development. Lavarel comes featured with advanced tools that make web apps in Laravel development fast, simple and smoother as it simplifies common tasks such as caching, security, routing, and authentication.

Pros:

Cons:

• Is not good with shared hosting
• Uses many queries in the database

CodeIgniter

CodeIgniter is a powerful PHP MVC framework that is used to develop dynamic and fully-featured web applications. It provides developers with a fast and simple development environment with small file sizes. It also has a wide list of libraries that can be used to connect with the database and also perform various operations such as sending emails, uploading files, managing sessions, etc.

Pros

• Has a smaller footprint
• Easy to configure
• Offers modern separation concept
• Supports both web page and database caching
• Advanced built-in security

Cons

• Lack of libraries
• The absence of default modular separation of code
• Development of kernel files
• There is no built-in ORM
• Complicated testing process

Symfony

It one of the oldest yet popular PHP frameworks that were introduced in 2005. Symfony is the first choice of PHP developers when it comes to developing complex, high-performance and large-scale enterprise-level websites. Its various components are using by various other CMSs like Drupal, ORO, CRM, PHPBB, and PIKWIk. This PHP framework is also known as an extensive PHP MVC framework that follows all the PHP standards. In this, developers can only use required libraries instead of accessing the entire library at once.

Pros

• High performance due to bytecode caching
• Good documentation
• Consumes less memory than others
• Large community
• Re-usability of codes
• It is easy to configure

Cons

• Amateur developers may face problems while extending codes and classes.
• Does not support MVC
• Sophisticated security mechanism.

CakePHP

Another widely used PHP framework that is powering thousands of websites today. This framework is popular among developers due to its advanced and reliable features. CakePHP is a commonly used framework that brings speed, security, and reliability in the development of web applications. It has a number of factors that come together with such as SQL injection prevention, easy extension, PHP MVC Framework architecture, cross-site request forgery (CSRF) protection, and cross-site scripting (XSS) prevention.

Pros

• Best for complex web app development
• Built-in components such as caching, checking access to the database and authentication.
• SQL injection prevention
• Great documentation
• Easy configuration

Cons

• CakPHP doesn’t support default routes for Fancy URLs.
• Problem with the learning curve.
• More Complex than other frameworks

Yii

Yii framework is an ideal framework of PHP which is secure, fast and high-performance and it is used to developing modern web applications. One can use this framework without any doubt to speed up the performance of their website as it is faster than the rest of the available frameworks, because of its lazy loading technique. Using this, developers can build apps with a simple interface by integrating jQuery.

Pros

Cons

• Presently, lacks the support for creating complex apps
• Lack of availability of Yii development experts

Zend Framework

Object-oriented features, re-suability of code, cryptographic coding tools, a connected database wizard, and instant online debugging tools are the core factors that make it a worthy framework for web application development. Zend framework supports front-end technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. And has become an ideal framework for complex and robust website development.

Pros

• Advanced tools for front-end
• Has wide developers community
• Supports third-party components
• Support for AJAX
• Easy to set up your MVC application

Cons

• It has a steep learning curve
• Getting started is not easy with the Zend framework

Phalcon

Phalcon was introduced in 2012 and since then it is in trend among the PHP developers. This framework has been written in C and C++ that help in the highest level of optimization and also best for fast executing. The most unique feature of the Phalcon framework is its C-extension, so you don’t have to learn C.

Pros

• Extremely fast
• Very flexible project structure
• Clean and secure project code
• Customizable with Zephir

Cons

• Require good programming skills
• The compiled extension (complex install, impossible on shared hosting)

FuelPHP

FuelPHP is also the most promising framework of PHP that was first released in 2011. This framework is best for impressive and functional website development and it also supports both MVC and HMVC architecture that helps you to display more than one page at a time. FuelPHP has a high level of security, a large set of templates, a powerful ORM, and its own authentication environment.

Pros

• Facilitated positive user interaction.
• Community enthusiasm
• Advanced security
• Modular with integrated ORM

Cons

• Not very beginner-friendly
• It is a new framework that has less support

PHPixie

PHPixie is an ideal PHP framework that was introduced in 2012. Aiming to create ready-only websites, this framework follows the HMVC design pattern similar to FuelPHP. The most interesting thing about PHPixie is its components that are 100% unit tested which means you require minimum dependencies.

Pros

• Independent components
• Easy to configure
• Lightweight framework with MongoDB support

Cons

• Low-speed Execution
• The smaller community of users than other frameworks

Slim

Slim is the best and powerful PHP framework that is used for developing RESTful APIs and services. This framework comes loaded with rich features and components that help you build APIs and services quickly.

Pros

• Easy to learn
• Best for useful APIs and services development
• Best framework for a small and large web application development

Cons

• Dependency injection is too weak
• Very little consistency among different versions
• Needs strong bases to create dependencies

Conclusion

Well, there are different PHP frameworks which work differently when you work on a project with them. In this article, we talked about different Top PHP frameworks and their uses such as creating robust web applications and much more. If you have a project that is based on PHP then you want to consider some experts in PHP. Hire expert PHP programmers for your project that might help you build your project quite faster and in a better manner. Hereby, the main aim of CMS development is to implement solutions facilitating creating, storing, organizing, modifying, and publishing web content.