Flight vs Symfony

What is Symfony?

Symfony is a set of reusable PHP components and a PHP framework for web projects.

The standard foundation on which the best PHP applications are built. Choose any of the 50 stand-alone components available for your own applications.

Speed up the creation and maintenance of your PHP web applications. End repetitive coding tasks and enjoy the power of controlling your code.

Pros compared to Flight

  • Symfony has a huge ecosystem of developers and modules that can be used to solve common problems.
  • Symfony has a full-featured ORM (Doctrine) that can be used to interact with your database.
  • Symfony has an large amount of documentation and tutorials that can be used to learn the framework.
  • Symfony has podcasts, conferences, meetings, videos, and other resources that can be used to learn the framework.
  • Symfony is geared towards a seasoned developer who is looking to build a full-featured, enterprise web application.

Cons compared to Flight

  • Symfony has a lot more going on underneath the hood than Flight does. This comes at a dramatic cost in terms of performance. See the TechEmpower benchmarks for more information.
  • Flight is geared towards a developer who is looking to build a lightweight, fast, and easy to use web application.
  • Flight is geared towards simplicity and ease of use.
  • One of Flight's core features is that it does it's best to maintain backwards compatibility.
  • Flight has no dependencies, whereas Symfony has a host of dependencies
  • Flight is meant for developers who are venturing into the land of frameworks for the first time.
  • Flight can also do enterprise level applications, but it does not have as many examples and tutorials as Symfony does. It will also require more discipline on the part of the developer to keep things organized and well-structured.
  • Flight gives the developer more control over the application, whereas Symfony can sneak in some magic behind the scenes.