Over 80% of the websites run with PHP, the most popular server-side scripting language in the world. Many businesses, big and small, prefer to create websites and web apps using PHP frameworks, thanks to their ability to create flexible, scalable, and robust end-products in a short span of time and at a low cost of development.

In this post, we’re going to give you a brief overview of the most popular PHP frameworks in the market at the moment, by market share:

Laravel (22.7%)

Laravel is a comparatively new entrant, released recently in 2012, but it has gone on to dominate today's market. It offers a great template building engine called as ‘Blade' and is easy to setup as well as maintain/upgrade. The developer community offers lots of support through ‘Laracasts’ or tutorials.

Symfony (15.1%)

Symfony is one of the more complex frameworks out there. It takes lots of programming knowledge (PHP5, OOP) to build something with it. They have excellent documentation, though, and you can make powerful software with full ORM support (through Propel, Doctrine). Symfony is a heavyweight tool suitable for large scale projects.

CodeIgniter (14.4%)

CodeIgniter has been around since 2006 and is a favourite with developers and citizen-developers because it is easy to use and learn. It doesn't require much customization and lets you set up quickly. However, it doesn't offer full ORM support or unit-testing. CodeIgniter is better used for small to medium-sized projects.

CakePHP (8.6%)

CakePHP is another easy to learn and easy-to-use framework. It is best used for small to medium projects. The framework has a lot of built-in functionality and offers full ORM support. While CakePHP is old, it has one of the best security systems around, with Form Validation support, and cross-site scripting and SQL Injection prevention.

Zend (7.8%)

Zend is not easy to learn or set up – it requires a thorough knowledge of PHP5, OOP, as well as Zend itself. The documentation is good, though, and it is suitable for medium to large-scale projects. It does not offer full ORM support, but the vast community behind it more than makes up for it. The Zend Framework forms the core of the modern eCommerce platform Magento.

If you're planning on building a website or enterprise-level web app for your business, which one should you pick? It depends on your vision, budgets and requirements. Openwave's experienced PHP developers can help you make the best choice as well as partner with you to build brilliant software at affordable price.