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Home / Corporate Blog / Laravel vs Yii: Which One You Should Opt For?

Laravel vs Yii: Which One You Should Opt For?

Published: October 8, 2021
Categories: Technologies

In 2021, PHP is remaining one of the most used back-end programming languages for building web solutions. This programming language is fast, flexible, simple, and offers an extensive set of tools for effective web development. That must be why 79% of all websites are created with PHP.

best php application framework

PHP offers many frameworks like Laravel, Symfony, Yii, and others to build complex web applications and speed up the development process. We have previously compared Laravel and Symfony frameworks and explained which one to choose depending on the type of project.  In this article, we’ll compare Laravel and Yii frameworks to understand when to choose one over another for your web development projects.

Laravel and Yii: Popularity Among Industries

Laravel and Yii are the two open-source web application PHP frameworks that follow the model-view-controller (MVC) development pattern. Both significantly alleviate and speed up the development process. Though, they have some differences in their development approaches.

Laravel offers web developers its own development philosophy that involves less coding and uncluttered, expressive syntax. Meanwhile, this robust framework gives software developers much development freedom and allows creating and adding the most complex functionality to the developed solutions.

Many companies prefer using Laravel as they can build web applications of any complexity and with diverse features. Laravel is a leading framework in Top 10K Sites, Top 100K Sites, Top 1M Sites, and The Entire Web.

Yii can boast of its simple data manipulation and rapid development due to a variety of ready-to-use features. It’s widely implemented for building web applications that require minimum business logic or quick standardized solutions.

According to Similar Tech reports, Laravel and Yii are used for building web applications in the following industries:

which framework is best for php

An Overview of Laravel

Laravel is one of the most popular PHP frameworks currently available in its 8.5.20 version released in June 2021. According to JetBrains, 67% of all PHP developers use Laravel in their web development projects. It provides web developers with a powerful toolset and strong development capabilities.

Here is a set of features that make Laravel a preferred solution for web development among other PHP frameworks:

  • Artisan – a command-line tool that helps to automate routine tasks, quickly create models and controllers, configure development tasks, and simply perform various development commands;
  • Eloquent – an Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) system that allows web developers to simply and effectively interact with the developed app’s databases; besides using the default Eloquent ORM, software developers can simply connect their Laravel projects with other ORM systems such as Doctrine 2;
  • extensive database support – Laravel supports MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, SQL Server, and other databases and helps web developers to integrate, run, and migrate them with ease;
  • Blade template engine – a powerful templating engine that makes work with View layer in MVC pattern simple and enjoyable; it compiles and caches views before modifying them, resulting in zero overloads to the built app;
  • PHP-Unit – provides integrated unit tests for the developed apps;
  • libraries – Laravel contains over 15,000 packages with various functionalities that alleviate work with routes, controllers, views, configuring, etc.;
  • Laravel service container – a useful container that keeps all the bindings together needed for smooth app work; software developers can quickly configure all the class dependencies and services with the service container and perform quick dependency injections along the development process;
  • Laravel Homestead – a virtual development environment that automatically installs and configures web server and server-related software on web developers’ machines, allowing them to start building web applications without lengthy infrastructure preparations;
  • Laravel Valet – a Laravel development environment for Mac users with Symfony, CakePHP 3, Slim, Zend, and WordPress support;
  • strong security features – in Laravel web developers can develop and implement various security features and methods, including authentication, authorization, email verification, encryption, hashing, password resets, protection against SQL injection and CSPF attacks, and others;
  • extensive documentation – Laravel has thorough documentation supplemented with a video tutorial library Laracast with over 1500 videos on how to work with the framework; moreover, Laravel.io has a strong community with 45,000 users who are ready to help with the emerging development challenges which occur in Laravel.

An Overview of Yii

Yii (Yes, It Is!) is a high-performance PHP framework launched in 2008. By 2021 the framework had already undergone several releases, and the latest version 2.0.43 appeared in August 2021. Currently, Yii creators are actively working on its 3d releas