Laravel vs Phalcon

People are becoming familiar with digital culture and this has led to more convenience in every sector like finance, health, education, etc. People are interacting with many applications for a variety of purposes and this increases the demand for new platforms. Developers are trying their best to provide quality services. So to help developers many researchers prepared frameworks that cut down the repetitive work of developers so that they can focus more on functionalities rather than worrying about security and performance. Laravel and Phalcon are two PHP frameworks so let’s compare these.

What is Laravel?

Laravel is an MIT-licensed PHP framework. It is a free and open-source web framework. It was developed by Taylor Otwell using MVC architectural pattern. It is highly expressive and follows elegant syntax. It was first launched in 2011 and become very popular due to its simplicity and rich features. 

Advantages of Laravel

• It has large community support.
• It is highly scalable and allows developers to build large and complex applications.
• Dependencies and packages can be installed easily through in-built CLI.
• Structured documentation makes it easy to understand.

Disadvantages of Laravel

• It has a weak composer as compared to other frameworks like Ruby gems, pip, etc.
• Shifting from one version to another is a complex process and does not work as expected.

What is Phalcon?

Phalcon is a web framework written in C, PHP, and Zephir. It was developed by Andres Gutierrez and a team of developers. It uses MVC architecture for better performance and customization options. Launched in 2012, it can be used on any operating system like Mac OS, Windows, Unix, etc. It has a BSD license.

Advantages of Phalcon

• It follows loosely coupled architecture. 
• It allows developers to inculcate different functionalities from the framework without changing their own base code.
• It leaves minimum memory footprints which makes it less vulnerable to attacks.
• It provides much better performance compared to other frameworks.

Disadvantages of Phalcon

• It is not much popular due to poor marketing.
• Difficult for beginners due to less complex documentation.

Below is a table of differentiation between Laravel and Phalcon:

Category	Laravel	Phalcon
Definition	Laravel is an open-source framework that is used in making simple PHP applications.	Phalcon is an MVC-based open-source framework that is used in making different applications.
Performance	It can handle around 500 requests per second.	It can handle 1000 requests per second easily.
Template Engine	It uses a powerful Blade template system.	It uses the Volt template system.
Customization	Design features and functionalities are less.	A large number of design features are available.
Database Support	It supports all the major databases.	It supports only few databases.
Source code	Laravel provided its source code for learning, it can be found on GitHub github.com/laravel	The source code of Phalcon can be found on github.com/phalcon/cphalcon
Popularity	Laravel is among the top 5 most popular PHP frameworks.	It is not much popular due to a lack of marketing and advertisements.
Scalability	It is highly scalable as compared to Phalcon.	It is less scalable.

Conclusion/Summary

On comparison, it can be seen that Laravel is highly popular and is used by many developers for building small to large-sized applications due to its simplicity and advanced features. On the other hand, Phalcon has a single advantage of performance over Laravel so Laravel is the winner if performance is not an issue.