PHP Community Chose the Best Libraries of 2024: Full Overview

PHP Community Chose the Best Libraries of the Year: Full Overview of Winners

The annual PHP community vote for the best libraries of the year has concluded with resounding results. Over 15,000 developers from around the world cast their votes for the tools they believe made the greatest contribution to the PHP ecosystem in 2024. In this article, we break down the top three in key categories.

Category "Best Framework": Unchanging Leader and New Players

In the web frameworks category, Laravel confidently took first place with 42% of the votes. Developers highlighted its powerful ecosystem, convenient Eloquent ORM, and built-in tools for working with queues and web sockets. Second place went to Symfony (31%) — a favorite for enterprise development due to its modularity and strict coding standards. CodeIgniter (9%) rounded out the top three, regaining popularity thanks to version 4.5 with improved performance.

Best Testing Tool: Code Quality Under Control

In the testing category, PHPUnit (48%) won — the classic standard for unit testing. Developers emphasized its stability and support for PHP 8.3. In second place was Pest (34%) — a modern tool with concise syntax and built-in support for parallel testing. Third place went to Mockery (12%) — an indispensable library for creating mock objects and stubs.

Best ORM and Database Work

The leader in this category was Doctrine ORM (39%), which maintains its position thanks to a powerful Query Builder and support for complex data schemas. Second place went to Eloquent (35%) — despite its ties to Laravel, the library is actively used outside the framework as well. RedBeanPHP (11%) rounds out the top three — a lightweight solution for projects without a strict database schema.

Special Categories: Best Utilities and Packages

• Best HTTP Client — Guzzle (54%): a stable tool for working with REST APIs, supporting PSR-7 and asynchronous requests.
• Best Template Engine — Twig (62%): a secure and high-performance engine used in most modern projects.
• Best Command Line Library — Symfony Console (71%): the foundation for creating console commands and Artisan scripts.
• Best Dependency Manager — Composer (89%): the undisputed leader, without which modern PHP development is unimaginable.

Trends of 2024: What Are Developers Choosing?

Analysis of the vote revealed several important trends. First, interest in asynchronous programming has sharply increased — libraries supporting parallel tasks (e.g., Amp and ReactPHP) received 40% more votes than the previous year. Second, the community is increasingly choosing tools with minimal memory consumption — this explains the success of lightweight frameworks like Slim and Flight. Third, there is a noticeable rise in the popularity of static analysis: PHPStan and Psalm entered the top 5 of the "Developer Tools" category.

The full list of nominees and detailed voting statistics