Thanks for that comparison; it was very useful!

Thanks for this article; it is really helpful. Here is my two cents from a learners point of view….

I am in the process of choosing a PHP framework for our project. I have looked at many and narrowed down to Cake PHP, symfony, Code Igniter (CI) and Zend Framework due to the availability of clear documents. Then I narrowed it down to symfony and CI due their better documents.

Amongst these four, symfony has by far the best documents. They have very good tutorials, “the book”, class library documents and even user contributed cheat sheets. But, boy the learning curve for symfony is so steep; symfony has so much conventions and configurations that it will take a lot of time before you could design your project.

On the other hand, CI is so simple and intuitive that make up for their lack of detailed tutorials (they have a couple of decent screen cast tutorials). I read the documentation in a couple of days (at my pace - maybe more experienced programmers can do much faster than me) and started the design for the project.

Compared to symfony, CI seems to lack some essential features that are inbuilt in symfony: page level security based on the user role, auto generated forms with search filters and validations, AJAX and layouts for the view. You need to develop your own login, security mechanism, form error handling (you could use CI form and validation helpers though) in CI. In CI, each view is sent to the browser by itself as opposed symfony which has layouts, templates, page fragments, slots, etc so you can easily create a site with multiple segments; so in CI, you need to develop a layout structure for the view so the common parts of the webpage are seperated. There are some user contributed articles in CI wiki to help you with this though.

Now, I seem to lean more towards CI for its simplicity. But it means I have to do more coding and integration of third party Ajax tools myself.

From performance side, I felt symfony is a bit slower compared to CI for the same task of displaying a few rows from the database.

Thank for all! it is really helpful for me.
I use CI and integrate Smarty for template, prototype for ajax, javascript and tinymce for HTML editor. I think that anough.

good comparison, i choice codeigniter, is easier than simfony.
Last month i was testing cakePHP & simfony and sudendly i see codeigniter and i said “it is what im looking for”..
well thanks soo much again by your comparison…

greetings! and God Bless you

Great table. I like simple as long as you are not losing anything in the mix. Also we do a lot of CodeIgniter sites with very advanced Ajax without any problems.

I’m building a site in symfony right now, and learning it in the process. I just took a quick look at codeigniter’s documentation, and I can immediately tell that codeigniter would be so much easier to learn. If you’ve never used CI or Symfony before and you need your app finished yesterday, I suggest CI.

That said, if you can take time to study and learn, I suggest symfony

These are really two very different frameworks. If you are doing a massive project, particularly one that needs to scale well, symfony is the answer. If you’re making a personal site and looking to have some nice libraries while organizing your code, CodeIgniter is the way to go. Anything in between just depends. CodeIgniter is extremely easy to learn because it is so intuitive, but it is also much smaller and less feature-rich. symfony is the exact opposite: tough learning curve but features galore. I’ve run both on shared and dedicated servers. Though symfony can run on a dedicated server, I don’t recommend it (it’s slightly better if you do your developing and testing on your own box, but still pretty resource-intensive).

I’ve recently released my website built with symfony on a shared host (no command line access, and no pear) and it worked perfectly fine.
The guys at symfony recently (about 8 months ago) created a simple command line to pack all the required library in your project folder so that deployment on the shared host only becomes a matter of uploading the files.

I think they were aware that shared host deployment was a weak point of their framework and addressed the issue quite well (to my experience).

Note that i never programmed anything in PHP prior to doing that website, but since i’m used to object programming I did find the symfony approach quite natural.

Expression Engine 2, which is due this summer, will sit on top of CodeIgniter. EE is compared to Movable Type more than often. Having such a great product would bring many people over to CI.

hey .. nice comparasion ..

FYI : symfony running well in shared hosting

just use the symfony freeze command, everything done

using symfony in a shared environment is just a matter of freezing, uploading and modifying include paths in the front controllers, very easy

He failed to mention that Codeigniter trumps over Symphony on:

Learning curve

Ease of deployment

Flexibility of hosting environments

PHP syntax even if it’s off in your PHP config

Lack of extraneous garbage

Speed of creation

non-overgrown documentation just for the sake of being large

Hey good man, you resolved alot of my issues. Thanks. Namaskara maga.

I find Symfony to be a powerful framework, even though I like codeigniter better and I use CI for most of my projects. Although, I find Symfony’s data schema.xml thing very unproductive and just plain unnecessary. Codeigniter has many good and bad features just like Symfony, but CI gives the developer more freedom (not taking over the whole application), so that they can create as simple or advanced of a web application as they want.

Code Igniter rocks. It’s so light weight, and it’s the easiest frameworkto learn in any language period. There are very few issues with compatibility anywhere ever on any hosting environment, and when there are, you just google the error code, or google site:codeigniter.com example error and you’ll find a fix instantly. I had a problem with my clean URLs not working correctly on Media Temple hosting (Because of their weird Apache configuration), and I found the fix in like 3 minutes.