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

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

At the beginning of 2025, the IT community was shaken by the news: several tech giants announced a partial or complete migration of their backend systems to PHP. After a decade of dominance by Python, Go, and Rust in corporate development, the classic "scripting" language is making a triumphant return.

According to JetBrains' analytical report for the first quarter of 2025, PHP's share in new enterprise projects grew by 18% compared to the same period last year. Among the companies that confirmed the migration to PHP are names like Spotify (part of microservices), Slack (internal analytics tools), and IKEA (online stores in the EMEA region).

Why Did 2025 Become the Year of PHP's Comeback?

Experts highlight three key drivers of this trend:

• Infrastructure savings. PHP 8.4 (released in December 2024) showed a performance increase of up to 40% in HTTP processing scenarios compared to Python 3.13. The result is a 25-30% reduction in server costs under the same load.
• Maturity of the Laravel ecosystem. The Laravel 12 framework, released in January 2025, introduced native support for async queues, a built-in WebSocket server, and seamless integration with Redis. This allowed companies to abandon workarounds in the form of additional Node.js microservices.
• The talent factor. The market is oversaturated with Junior-level Python developers, while experienced PHP engineers (5+ years) have become scarce. Large companies are snapping up such talent, offering salaries comparable to Golang specialists ($150-200k per year).

Spotify Case Study: How PHP Replaced Python

On March 14, 2025, the Spotify team published a post on their blog titled "Why we rewrote our recommendation engine in PHP." The main reason was delays in Python scripts when processing playlists with millions of tracks. PHP 8.4 with JIT compilation handled the task 3.2 times faster, and the code on Laravel Octane turned out to be 2 times more compact.

"We didn't expect PHP to outperform Python in computational tasks," admitted Spotify's CTO. "But tests showed that for 80% of our scenarios, PHP is the optimal choice in terms of speed-to-development cost ratio."

What Does This Mean for Developers?

For PythonLib readers, this trend is not a reason to panic, but a signal to diversify skills. PHP and Python are increasingly coexisting in the same ecosystem: Python for Data Science and AI, PHP for high-load web. According to Stack Overflow 2024, developers proficient in both languages earn on average 22% more.

We recommend paying attention to:

• Learning PHP 8.4 for web development (a basic course on pythonlib.ru is already in progress)
• Mastering Laravel 12 for creating APIs
• Integrating PHP services with Python models via Thrift or gRPC

2025 is breaking stereotypes: PHP is no longer "a language for beginners and WordPress." It is a mature, fast, and cost-effective tool for corporate development. Stay tuned for updates on pythonlib.ru