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Comment by conradfr | Hacker News Reader

I'm still not sure why anybody would use Laravel instead of Symfony but Taylor Otwell bank account proves I'm apparently stupid.

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in my experience, symfony looked like a massive, old, gross, enterprisy solution... laravel got as far out of my way as it could and had absolutely unbelievable documentation.

I am not a php person, but was on a php project and we were trying to run absolutely as fast as we could.... and laravel let us do that very effectively. If i was a php greybeard or something maybe I would've preferred symfony... but looking at our legacy symphony system compared to the laravel system we stood up and replace it.... I cannot imagine making a different choice

Yes, and at this point Laravel has a healthy ecosystem built up around it. There's a large community, tons of plugins available, and professional support for it.

If there’s one thing I hate about Laravel, it’s the docs. Some things are documented, arbitrary others aren’t; many APIs offer multiple aliases or equivalent ways to solve the same problem, and the docs use them interchangeably. Sometimes there’s multiple paragraphs for an obvious feature, but a single sentence for something complicated, and you’ll have to try for yourself to find out how it behaves.

That’s fair in certain parts. I like the balance they struck (at the time at least) of not super in the weeds but not high level tutorial mode. A few things around their orm specifically were a little confusing or sparse at times if memory serves

It's been interesting seeing several comments like this in the comments, since Laravel's docs may be one of the most highly-praised aspects of the framework. I suspect the divide may be that newer developers get everything they need explained in the docs in clear language, but the more advanced stuff requires some digging.

I use Laravel personally, and I've definitely seen both sides of this myself. For basic "happy-path" API reference, the docs are great. If I really need to understand how the framework is doing something, I pretty much always end up diving into the code. Unfortunately the heavy use of Facades can sometimes make it annoying to find the underlying code.

I personally haven't used "raw" Symfony but maintain a largeish Laravel application and I like almost everything about Laravel. Great documentation, good developer experience, big ecosystem.

Have you used both extensively and prefer "raw" Symfony?

I'm not sure what is "raw" Symfony.

But I also think the Symfony documentation is probably the best documentation I've ever used (programming the web since the 90s) with fantastic DX so to each their own, after all competition is good.

Laravel sits on top of symfony, so with laravel you're using symfony anyway. Without laravel, you have symfony "raw".

Im a PHP dev and used both extensively and I would say both frameworks are great in their own ways, Laravel is geared more towards beginners / ease and speed of development since there is more handholding and “magic” stuff, whilst Symfony feels more “formal” and is used in larger projects.

Also, i feel Laravel is used more in the US and Symfony more in Europe.

So its really a preference thing here, you cant really go wrong either way.

Taylor has said he’s not against supporting other frameworks/apps if there is demand. Symfony and Statamic are ones I’ve seen mentioned a few times. Wouldn’t be surprised if they appear in the medium term future.

Becaus while Symfony seemed to be "the right way to do it", Laravel focused on DX and the ecosystem and was still performant enough to start a business and scale it.

There is just more attraction for things that make it easy for people to work with / build stuff, for that very reason RoR is still a big thing in 2025 and if you look at Java, people are still using Spring Boot while there are interesting competitors who may have an edge in performance and some other aspects (e.g. Quarkus).

Why would anyone use Symfony instead of Laravel?

Bluntly, because from a pure ecosystem and usability for new users perspective Symfony massively dropped the ball.

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