So having looked into php frameworks a bit.

There are 2 main packages of reusable components in php. Symfony and Zend.

Somewhat confusingly Zend and Symfony also make frameworks built on top of these components. But you can use the components on their own. Use the Composer to install the ones you need. You don't even need a framework to use them.

Laravel is built on top of Symfony components.

I think the main advantage to Laravel is people who use it really tend to like it... a lot. I hear a lot of complaining about other frameworks, but Laravel people enjoy. People that figure it out tend to get sites up really quickly. The main downside I hear about is performance.

For me documentation is key. I tried using Zend components, and while they worked I find the documentation really lacking. Zend have some great stuff like an api builder, but documentation is really important and its why I'll probably end up trying Laravel

Having worked with Kohana, CodeIgniter and WP, Laravel is the reason I started writing PHP again. Also being a node developer, Laravel feels at home with Express(both influenced by Sinatra).

Artisan command line utility, Migrations for DB version control, Blade template engine and the neat directory structure are some of the things I like apart from the community ofcourse

I just started with Laravel and can't compare it really well to the other frameworks, but this is what I like so far:

- it's well-documented

- it has an active community

- I simply enjoy working with it. It feels lightweight, although it probably isn't, if I take a good look at the "vendor" folder and the dependencies

- I get stuff done relatively quickly

Edit: So I started porting my small Laravel 4 project to 5 and to be honest, my first impression is: Laravel 5 is more like Zend Framework than the small and nice PHP framework. It lost a bit of its lightweight flair for a potentially more structured architecture, but I kind of hate to put everything in "Service Providers" and "Middleware" and whatnot.

E. g. before, you had a folder "app/controllers", now you have "app/Http/Controllers" and "app/Http/Middleware" and "app/Http/Requests". While this might make sense for bigger projects, it also loses a bit of its lightweight charm.

With Laravel 4, things seemed to be more straight forward.

As some other commenters wrote - there's not that many differences with Symfony approach-wise. But it's more fun to write code in Laravel, Symfony on the other hand is incredibly verbose which is not a good thing in my opinion. You have to write way more code to achieve same thing in Symfony compared to Laravel.

Laravel has very reasonable and easy to understand structure and you don't need to use .xml or .yml for configuration.

I've had experience in CodeIgniter, Symfony, FuelPHP and I've been sticking with Laravel for over two years because of how simply nice it is to work with.

Over cake, it's modern, widely used and supported.

Over Symfony, not a lot tbh (large parts of Laravel are built on Symfony), it's a lot more opinionated out the box than Symfony and Eloquent has a flatter learning curve than Doctrine.

Let's add Codeigniter to the list too. Need a pitch for the employer.

Laravel changes.. er.. updates a lot more often

Highly active community with awesome mentors like Jeffery Way (laracasts.com).