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PHP Community Chooses Best Libraries of the Year: Results of the PHP Package Awards 2024
The annual PHP Package Awards, organized by the largest PHP community portal PHP.net and the Packagist platform, has concluded with the announcement of winners. More than 12,000 developers from 80 countries participated in the voting, evaluating packages in 12 categories. We have gathered the key results and analyzed which trends dominate the PHP ecosystem in 2024.
Category Leaders
- Best HTTP Request Library: Guzzle — the perennial leader, receiving 34% of the votes. Developers noted its stability, PSR-18 support, and built-in middleware.
- Best ORM/Database: Doctrine ORM — 29% of the votes. Despite the growing popularity of Eloquent (Laravel), Doctrine maintains its position thanks to detailed documentation and strict typing.
- Best Template Engine: Twig — 41% of the votes. The gap from competitors (Blade, Smarty) was almost 20 percentage points.
- Best Testing Library: PHPUnit — 52% of the votes. An absolute record for the year: more than half of respondents consider it the de facto standard.
- Best Logger: Monolog — 38% of the votes. A library integrated into virtually all modern PHP frameworks.
- Best Date/Time Library: Carbon — 47% of the votes. Developers value it for its convenient API and full compatibility with DateTime.
In the "Breakthrough of the Year" category, the winner was the Laravel Reverb package — an official solution for WebSocket servers built into the Laravel ecosystem. Over the year, it accumulated more than 5 million installations via Composer.
Trends of 2024
Analysis of the voting and participant comments allows us to highlight several key trends:
- Asynchrony and Reactivity — interest in libraries for parallel execution (Amp, ReactPHP, Swoole) increased by 27% compared to last year.
- Migration to PHP 8.x — 89% of winners already require PHP 8.1 or higher, actively using attributes, enums, and named arguments.
- Security — packages with input validation functions (Respect\\Validation, Symfony Validator) entered the top 5 by number of votes in the "Utilities" category.
- Integration with AI/ML — the RubixML library received a special jury prize as the fastest-growing project (+340% installation growth over the year).
Expert Opinion
We asked Dmitry Sokolov, moderator of the PHP community on Habr and author of a course on modern PHP, to comment on the results:
"This year's winners are not just convenient tools, but a reflection of the ecosystem's maturity. Guzzle and Doctrine have maintained a high quality bar for over a decade. But the main thing is that the community votes not for novelty, but for stability and backward compatibility."
