Symfony vs Zend

Websites and web applications have become an integral part of human life, these help in performing different tasks in a convenient and effective manner. These applications are built using different tools like a programming language, framework, IDE, etc. Frameworks help in fast development and save a lot of time for developers. These frameworks ease testing and also provide better performance. There are different frameworks available for different programming languages. So let’s discuss the two commonly used PHP frameworks which are Symfony and Zend.

Symfony can be understood as a tool that provides reusable components for faster development of PHP-based applications. It is available as free software on its official website. It was first released in 2005 under an MIT license and its original author is Fabien Potencier. It is a cross-platform application and is widely used in developing large and complex web applications without compromising performance.

Advantages of Symfony

• It comes with a command line interface which helps in testing input and output while developing applications.
• It is known for its high performance.
• It comes with an internationalization feature that provides multiple language support.
• It can be easily scaled.

Disadvantages of Symfony

• Symphony-based applications take lots of time in testing.
• Cost of maintaining symphony-based applications is higher as compared to other frameworks.

Zend launched by Zend Technologies is a PHP web framework. It is a free and open-source framework that is covered under the BSD license. Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski were the founders of Zend Technologies which was later acquired by Perforce. It can be downloaded from its official site for free. It was built with the help of Ruby on Rails which helps in separating different layers like business layers, service layers, and presentation layers from one another using Models, Views, and Controllers.

Advantages of Zend

• It helps in faster development by reducing testing time through automated testing features.
• Progress of components can be easily tracked using task scheduling functionality.
• It appreciates security by design and hence provides highly secure authorization.
• It provides a code control feature which helps in maintaining quality.

Disadvantages of Zend

• It lacks custom coding functionality.
• It contains unorganized documentation which is difficult and confusing.

Below is a table of differentiation between Symfony and Zend:

	Symfony	Zend
Definition	Symfony is a PHP framework used in making complex applications and projects.	Zend is an MVC-based free framework that is used in making different applications.
Security	It takes security as a priority feature and provides highly secure authentication and authorization.	It helps in maintaining privacy but offers only authentication functionality.
Features	Some of the basic features of Symfony are Docket Management, Document Management, IP Portfolio Management, etc.	Some of the basic features of Zend are Deployment Management, Assistance, Code control, etc.
Developer(s)	It was developed by the Symfony community.	It was developed by Zend Technologies.
Source Code	Its source code is available at https://github.com/symfony/symfony	Its source code is available at https://github.com/zendframework/zendframework
Installations	It has more than 600 million installations.	It has more than 570 million installations and is the fourth most used PHP framework.
Serialization	Serialization is easy for simple as well as complex objects.	It is good to serialize simple objects but is difficult for complex objects.
Templates	Twig is used to create templates.	Static templates are used for script writing.

Conclusion/Summary

From the above dialogue, it is quite clear that Symfony is a winner in terms of templates, plugins, database modules, and a clean mastering curve. On the other hand, Zend is also being used by many developers depending on the requirements. So one can use any framework depending on the project requirement and client budget.