Survey: Which PHP Frameworks Are Actually Used in Production in 2024?

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Survey: which PHP frameworks are chosen for production in 2024

Despite the rapid growth of Go, Rust, and Python, PHP remains the main language for web development: it powers 76.5% of all websites (W3Techs data). But which framework is chosen today for serious production workloads? We analyzed the results of a 2024 developer survey and compiled the key figures.

Race leaders: who is on the podium

According to the annual JetBrains Developer Ecosystem 2023–2024 survey (over 26,000 developers participated) and the internal survey of the PHP Weekly community, the distribution of PHP frameworks in production looks like this:

Laravel — 46% (unconditional leader). Elegant syntax, powerful Eloquent ORM, and ecosystem (Forge, Vapor) make it the #1 choice for startups and enterprise.
Symfony — 21%. Favorite for large corporate projects. Modularity, long-term support (LTS), and Drupal as a client.
Yii2 — 12%. Strong positions in the CIS and Asia. High performance and built-in caching.
CodeIgniter — 4%. Simplicity and lightweight — for small projects without complex dependencies.
Zend Framework / Laminas — 3%. Legacy of large corporations, but gradually giving way to Symfony.
Phalcon — 2%. Unique approach: framework as a C-extension. Provides maximum speed, but is complex to maintain.

Note: 12% of respondents stated they do not use frameworks at all — they write in pure PHP, often with custom micro-frameworks or Slim.

Trends and unexpected conclusions

The survey revealed several important trends:

Laravel is growing the fastest — its share has increased by 10% over the last 3 years. Reason: aggressive marketing, excellent documentation, and Livewire support for interactive interfaces without Vue/React.
Symfony is strengthening its position in B2B. Demand for the "framework of frameworks" is growing: Drupal, OroCRM, Sylius, and even API Platform are based on Symfony.
Yii2 has stopped growing. The community has stalled, and the transition to Yii3 is dragging on. Many are migrating to Laravel.
Micro-frameworks (Slim, Flight) are gaining popularity for APIs and microservices — their share has grown to 8%.

What to choose for beginners and pros?

If you are just entering PHP development — definitely Laravel. It gives a quick start, a huge community, and thousands of packages. For the corporate sector (banks, logistics) Symfony is better — strict architecture and compliance with enterprise standards. For high-load projects with limited server budgets, take a look at Yii2 or Phalcon.

The main thing is not to chase trends, but to choose based on real tasks. In any case, PHP frameworks will remain the foundation of the web for a long time.