CodeIgniter Vs. CakePHP Vs. Yii Vs. Laravel

Over 80% of the hundreds of millions of websites on the internet use PHP as a server-side scripting language. Having proved its power and performance housing the most popular web applications like Facebook Newsroom, BBC America, Wikipedia, Yahoo!, there is no doubt that the language itself is the best for web development. The debate, however, has shifted to another component- i.e. frameworks.

With dozens of PHP frameworks available today, the choice of which has much influence on the quality of the final application, it becomes essential that you deploy only the best.

With four of the most popular PHP frameworks on the scale, let’s take a look at which one comes out on the top:

But before we elaborate on the features of each framework, it is worth mentioning that all these frameworks are very efficient and have proved their ability at multiple projects. Since each offers the same basic functionality, we will only highlight their unique strengths and what makes them stand out.

CodeIgniter

Housing a large set of libraries to quickly deploy the most common features, CodeIgniter development enables web applications to be created with minimal coding efforts. The lightweight framework also has a decent debugging mechanism and makes it easy for developers to use modular components.

CakePHP

To start with, CakePHP is based on MVC (Model View Controller) model that enables it to handle the largest projects smoothly. The framework is also auto-configurable, thus, enabling developers to get straight to the business without wasting their efforts in housekeeping. CakePHP development also benefits a lot from its ability to create custom test cases, that proves to be exceptionally profitable for large projects, where it is not feasible to test the entire application every time.

Yii

Having an immensely powerful caching mechanism, the applications built on Yii are known to be extremely fast and responsive. With an elaborate set of security features like Cross-site Scripting Prevention, Cookie Attack Prevention, among others, Yii, along with being highly secure, is also capable of handling much larger number of requests than others.

Laravel

The first thing that stands out for Laravel web development is its simplicity and the swift learning curve that it offers. This not only helps applications to be developed faster, but the elaborate set of packages on the offer also ensures that the application has all the required features and scalable to handle all degrees of traffic.

The winner

When it comes to tools and technologies, there is hardly an absolute winner. The verdict largely depends on the purpose for which tools are deployed. So, keeping that in mind, let’s take a look at which framework serves what purposes the best:

If all you need is rapid development for your web application that has minimum code to make the future maintenance easy, CodeIginier will be more than able to meet your needs.

Here are the various suggestions for varying requirements:

If you have some very large application to build that will come with its own set of complexities and an extensive list of features, hire a PHP developer proficient in CakePHP and you will be more than satisfied with the result.

If performance and security are the core concerns for your web applications, choose none other than Yii for delightful results.