Choosing the right framework to build your next big idea is always difficult given the long-term implications. Fortunately, there is a lot of great frameworks that are gaining traction in PHP and you are spoiled for choices. But that also makes the decision harder.
Though your decision will be greatly influenced by qualitative factors, we did research on quantitatively which framework is getting the most traction. Call it the wisdom of the crowd! Hope this will help you make your choice.
We considered Laravel, CodeIgniter, Zend and Symfony as they are coming up as options the most often when we choose our architecture. We have built multiple applications on this frameworks and will share our experiences and learnings from the trenches in another blog soon.
We ranked the traction based on
- Continued robust development of the platform
- Developer adoption
- Community support
Google Trends
We started with Google trends which show Laravel is clearly gaining momentum in the last couple of years.
GitHub
Though the number of contributors varies only marginally, the number of people who have shown interest in Laravel is significantly higher than in other frameworks. Also, the Fork numbers indicate the number of new projects in each framework initiated in the last year.
Stack Overflow
This is the obvious place to measure community support and interest.
Over the past one year, there have been more questions on Laravel comparing to CodeIgniter. Its promising that symphony is not far behind. It also shows the transition happening in PHP where more developers are moving towards Laravel.
HotFrameworks
Summary of findings:
In our research, clearly, Laravel is having the most momentum and gaining on Zend and CodeIgniter. In a relatively short time span, Laravel has amassed an engaging community which in turn is attracting more developers. With unique features like Eloquent ORM, Query Builder, and Homestead, Laravel is definitely here to stay.
About Ideas2IT,
Are you looking to build a great product or service? Do you foresee technical challenges? If you answered yes to the above questions, then you must talk to us. We are a world-class custom .NET development company. We take up projects that are in our area of expertise. We know what we are good at and more importantly what we are not. We carefully choose projects where we strongly believe that we can add value. And not just in engineering but also in terms of how well we understand the domain. Book a free consultation with us today. Let’s work together.