PHP Community Chooses Best Libraries of 2024

PHP Community Chooses the Best Libraries of the Year: 2024 Voting Results

The annual vote for the best PHP libraries, organized by the portal PHP Annotated with the support of the international PHP community, has concluded. This year, over 14,000 developers from 120 countries participated in the survey. Participants chose winners in 12 categories covering all key aspects of modern PHP development, from frameworks to static analysis tools.

The main winner of 2024 was Laravel, which won in three categories: "Best Framework", "Best ORM" (Eloquent), and "Best Authentication Package" (Laravel Sanctum). However, the surprises did not end there: in the "Best Micro Library" category, Symfony Panther unexpectedly won — a tool for end-to-end testing, surpassing the long-time leader PHPUnit.

Here is the full list of winners in the key categories:

• Best Framework: Laravel
• Best Micro Library: Symfony Panther
• Best HTTP Client: Guzzle
• Best Database Library: Doctrine ORM
• Best Testing Tool: Pest PHP
• Best Static Analyzer: PHPStan
• Best Logging Package: Monolog
• Best Template Engine: Twig
• Best API Library: Laravel Sanctum
• Best Dependency Manager: Composer
• Best Queue Tool: Laravel Horizon
• Best Caching Library: Symfony Cache

Special attention should be paid to the rise of Pest PHP — a minimalist testing framework that surpassed classic PHPUnit this year. Developers noted its expressive syntax and built-in support for mutation testing. "Pest makes writing tests as enjoyable as writing the code itself," commented one of the voting participants.

In the static analysis category, the permanent leader PHPStan once again confirmed its status, receiving 68% of the votes. Its closest competitor, Psalm, got 22%, while the remaining 10% were distributed between Phan and Exakat. This indicates that the community is paying more and more attention to code quality at the development stage, not just during reviews.

It is worth noting that this year, the "Best Library for Artificial Intelligence" category appeared in the voting for the first time. The winner was OpenAI PHP — a client for working with the OpenAI API, which allows easy integration of ChatGPT and DALL-E into PHP projects. This fact points to the growing trend of integrating AI functionality into web development with PHP.

The voting results once again confirm that the PHP ecosystem remains one of the most active and innovative. If you are just starting your journey in PHP or want to update your technology stack, look to this list — it was compiled by practicing developers for developers.

The full report with analytics for each category and comments from jury members is available on the official PHP Annotated website.