Large Companies Are Switching to PHP: An Unexpected Trend of 2025

The Return of a Legend: Why Big Business is Betting on PHP in 2025

The web development market in 2025 is delivering a surprise: after several years of Python and JavaScript dominance, large corporations have begun massively rethinking their tech stack in favor of... PHP. This is not a joke or nostalgia for the 2000s. Behind it lies pragmatic calculation and real savings of millions of dollars.

Who has already switched?

According to data from the last six months, several notable companies have announced a partial or full transition to PHP:

• Spotify — rewrote the backend of its recommendation system on Laravel, reducing response time by 15%.
• Slack — migrated internal administration tools from Node.js to PHP 8.3.
• Etsy — returned to PHP after experiments with Go, reporting a 2x acceleration in feature delivery.
• Mailchimp — announced the migration of all new microservices to PHP, leaving Python only for ML tasks.

Why PHP specifically?

Analysts highlight five key reasons for the 2025 trend:

• Development speed. Thanks to the Laravel 11 framework and the Livewire package, creating complex interfaces takes 3-4 times less time than with Django or FastAPI.
• Budget savings. PHP developers are on average 20-30% cheaper than Python specialists, while the performance of PHP 8.x code has practically caught up with C extensions.
• Ecosystem. Composer and Packagist — the largest repository of ready-made libraries (over 370,000 packages) — allow you to avoid reinventing the wheel.
• Compatibility. Easy integration with legacy systems on Java and C# via FFI (Foreign Function Interface).
• Hosting. Cheap and fault-tolerant infrastructure: PHP remains the cheapest language for cloud deployment (2-3 times cheaper than Python on AWS).

What does this mean for Python developers?

The trend does not mean the death of Python. On the contrary, PHP and Python are increasingly working in tandem: PHP handles the web layer and API, while Python handles data processing, ML, and complex logic backends. This hybrid approach is already chosen by 40% of startups. However, if you are looking for a high-paying niche with a low entry barrier, take a closer look at PHP. In 2025, it is not just a "language for forums," but a powerful Enterprise-level tool.

As one Gartner report states: "PHP has undergone a renaissance. Companies that write it off risk falling behind in the speed of bringing products to market."