10 Best Free PHP Frameworks to use
1. LaravelLaravel is a free, open-source PHP web framework, intended for the development of web applications following the model–view–controller (MVC) architectural pattern. Some of the features of Laravel are a modular packaging system with a dedicated dependency manager, different ways for accessing relational databases, utilities that aid in application deployment and maintenance, and its orientation toward syntactic sugar. The latest version of Laravel comes as individual Composer packages. It features with good routing, easy authentication, migrations support, Blade templating engine.
2. Symfony
Symfony is a PHP web application framework and a set of reusable PHP components/libraries; is a flexible, scalable yet powerful PHP frameworks for MVC application. There are plenty of reusable PHP components that can can be used like Security, Templating, Translation, Validator, Form Config and more. Like Laravel, it’s alss modularize with Composer. Its goal is to make your web application creation and maintenance faster with less repetitive coding.
3. CodeIgniter
CodeIgniter is a free PHP framework maintain by EllisLab. It has an excellent documentation with large user community. There are many features that will make you taste CodeIgniter for your project such as no PHP version conflict, almost zero installation, easy error handling, easy security and encryption steps and has rich built-in libraries and helper.
4. CakePHP
CakePHP is a PHP framework that support version 4 and above. It is easy to learn with fast and flexible templating. The integrated CRUD (create, read, update and delete) is a handy feature in CakePHP for your database interaction. It also has various built-in feature for security, email, session, cookie and request handling.
5. Zend
Zend is a scalable and full featured object-oriented PHP framework. It has an online training and certification which make it popular and used by plenty of enterprise organizations. With its OOP (object-oriented programming) and design patterns consistency, you can easily extend custom classes and use only what you need.
6. Phalcon
Phalcon framework offers the same ability which is speed. When benchmarked with other popular frameworks, it has the fastest time request and lowest memory usage according to Systems Architect and Phalcon crew test. This happen because it was purely written with C/C++ for performance optimization purpose.
7. Slim
Slim is a lightweight micro-framework for PHP inspired by Sinatra, a Ruby framework. It has a tiny size without overkill learning curve. It’s built with incredible routing system and focuses on RESTful API with all HTTP methods (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE) supports. To use it, you need at least has a PHP version of 5.2+.
8. Yii
Yii is a modern PHP framework with OOP deain system inside. Besides easy to install, it’s also highly extensible, enabling you to fit what you need. There are several tools that can help you easily tune your web application for better performance. Yii has built in integration with a great PHP testing framework, CodeCeption, to test your application easier and faster.
9. Fat-Free
Fat-Free is a powerful and easy to use PHP micro-framework. Fat-Free is one of lightweight framework with less than 50KB. It was developed almost entirely in PHP with main features of URL router, multilingual application support and cache engine. There are plentiful plugins for a large number of database back-end like MySQL, MSSQL, SQLite, Sybase, DB2, MongoDB, CouchDB, PostgreSQL and Flat File.
10. Kohana
Kohana is a PHP framework with (Hierarchical Model View Controller) architectural pattern. Kohana was built with PHP OOP in mind, which means you should you’ll get some advantages from it to have visibility protection, abstracts, automatic class loading, interfaces, overloading and singletons. The GET, POST, COOKIE, and SESSION methods can also be used as you want.
