You're unlikely to get a "Yii is better than Laravel" answer on a Laravel forum. But here's my reasoning...

In terms of my experience, I used Yii 1.x for 3 years on over 10 separate projects. It performed brilliantly and I enjoyed working with it - but it was starting to show it's age with things like Composer starting to make waves. Whilst Yii 2 supports it, it feels like an add-on rather than a core focus. And there isn't a big enough reason for me to switch as Laravel does everything I've needed in a mid-weight framework.

The Yii community is about to go through a big push towards v2. Documentation, community support and plug-ins will be slow in coming. It's not even production ready - and it might take any where between a month to a year to get a final, production version released.

And frustratingly, Yii 2 doesn't look like a massive change from an end-user point of view. It looks to be a rebuild to improve architecture rather than being geared around making development with the framework any easier.

I could go on - but for those reasons enough, Laravel beats out at the moment.

jayhealey said:

You're unlikely to get a "Yii is better than Laravel" answer on a Laravel forum. But here's my reasoning...

In terms of my experience, I used Yii 1.x for 3 years on over 10 separate projects. It performed brilliantly and I enjoyed working with it - but it was starting to show it's age with things like Composer starting to make waves. Whilst Yii 2 supports it, it feels like an add-on rather than a core focus. And there isn't a big enough reason for me to switch as Laravel does everything I've needed in a mid-weight framework.

The Yii community is about to go through a big push towards v2. Documentation, community support and plug-ins will be slow in coming. It's not even production ready - and it might take any where between a month to a year to get a final, production version released.

And frustratingly, Yii 2 doesn't look like a massive change from an end-user point of view. It looks to be a rebuild to improve architecture rather than being geared around making development with the framework any easier.

I could go on - but for those reasons enough, Laravel beats out at the moment.

Ok.. thanks.

But is it true that Laravel is kinda slower due to overheads and all?

Check this out Not much of a difference in speed.

Don't bother looking at framework speed unless it's like 50x the others. It will never be your bottleneck in any realistic application (that'll pretty much always be your DB or some sloppy code).

I hate this kind of benchmark that does not help us choose a framework!

Why we would choose a framework for how fast it prints " hello world " for us? After all, if it mattered , we would not need a framework!!!

Why choose a framework? Because we save time in development? By adopting the code patterns that we do grow professionally ? For creating and maintaining systems that can be easily updatable by us and anyone else who knows the framework or best practices in PHP development ? Performance is not the primary requirement in the choice . Before knowing how fast a framework is , we need to know how complete and easy to use it is to us. Community support , the future for the person / company that keeps things are relevant in the choice , after all no one thinks about changing all the time framework .

As we like to develop with him , he should give us pleasure in the development .

For now my choice is Laravel , although I am also evaluating Cake , CI and Yii

You should only evaluate a benchmark when he does the tests you will use in your application. If not, make your own benchmarks.

NeiPCs said:

I hate this kind of benchmark that does not help us choose a framework!

Why we would choose a framework for how fast it prints " hello world " for us? After all, if it mattered , we would not need a framework!!!

Why choose a framework? Because we save time in development? By adopting the code patterns that we do grow professionally ? For creating and maintaining systems that can be easily updatable by us and anyone else who knows the framework or best practices in PHP development ? Performance is not the primary requirement in the choice . Before knowing how fast a framework is , we need to know how complete and easy to use it is to us. Community support , the future for the person / company that keeps things are relevant in the choice , after all no one thinks about changing all the time framework .

As we like to develop with him , he should give us pleasure in the development .

For now my choice is Laravel , although I am also evaluating Cake , CI and Yii

You should only evaluate a benchmark when he does the tests you will use in your application. If not, make your own benchmarks.

That might be the best option. Might do a prototype on both and see which one suits me well.

Well, about speed, I'm triying a hello world in laravel and yii2 (the last version) and it's giving me a very substantial difference, (yii 153 requests per second vs 64 request from laravel and giving me very irregular times each try) a whole lot bigger than this chart shows (I think that it's pretty old, the phalcon php dudes did some benchmarking and also yii was a lot faster than laravel).

About which one it's better, I don't know, sorry, I haven't studied both of them yet, there's a lot of laravel fanboys storming the internet lately and yii it's less... proselitized, I only know that.

Choose the framework which you like. so easy.