Best leading PHP frameworks in 2019

The top 10 PHP frameworks

Here’s a list of the best PHP frameworks, based on popularity and ability to facilitate application development.

1. Laravel
2. Symfony
3. CodeIgniter
4. Zend
5. CakePHP
6. FuelPHP
7. Yii 2
8. Phalcon
9. Slim
10. PHPixie

1. Laravel

If frameworks were people, Laravel would probably be the king. If you want to code beautiful designs, you’re looking for Laravel since it’s positioned as the go-to PHP framework for web artisans.

The reason for its wide popularity boils down to ease of use and virtually no learning curve. And despite that, it’s a framework developer use for some serious work. So it may seem like a simple tool at first, but it’s a beast when it comes to producing concrete work.

2. Symfony

When it comes to developing large-scale enterprise projects, Symfony makes a perfect choice amongst the PHP frameworks. Its ecosystem is a huge one, with a big set of reusable components and an active community of developers. The components serve the purpose of completing diverse tasks such as for creation, the configuration of objects, authentication, routing, templating, and much more. These components are being used to power up projects such as Drupal, Laravel, PHPBB, PIWIk, and OROCRM.

3. CodeIgniter

CodeIgniter is one of the oldest frameworks but is simple and powerful. It can easily be installed and requires minimal user configuration. It works perfectly on almost all shared and dedicated hosting platforms. CodeIgniter isn’t entirely based on the MVC framework. Models and Views are optional, but Controller classes are a must. Another strength of CodeIgniter is speed. It runs faster with database tasks in comparison to other frameworks. CodeIgniter is well documented and a good framework to start with for PHP beginners.