Laravel — the productive default
Laravel optimises for developer speed and a pleasant day-to-day experience, backed by a huge ecosystem. Eloquent gives you database access in readable method chains, Artisan scaffolds code from the command line, and queues, auth and scheduling are already wired up. For most new business web apps it's the fastest route to a maintainable result, which is why it's the most common choice. The trade-off is that its conventions are opinionated — fight them and you lose much of the benefit.
Symfony — the enterprise toolkit
Symfony is more modular and configuration-driven, favoured for large, long-lived enterprise systems where flexibility and strict architecture matter more than out-of-the-box speed. It leans on explicit configuration and decoupled components you assemble yourself, which suits teams that want control over every layer. In fact, Laravel is built on top of several Symfony components — the HTTP foundation, routing and console among them — so this is less a rivalry than two philosophies sharing a foundation.
CodeIgniter — the lightweight option
CodeIgniter is small and simple, with a gentle learning curve and low overhead. It suits smaller projects, legacy maintenance, or teams that want minimal structure and a single small footprint to deploy. But it lacks Laravel's ecosystem, its ORM is thinner, and you'll hand-build things Laravel gives you free — so the early simplicity can cost you later as the app grows.
And then there's raw PHP and Node
Frameworks aren't the only choice. Raw PHP — no framework — can make sense for a tiny script or a single endpoint, but on anything real you end up re-inventing routing, security and database handling by hand, usually worse than a framework would. Node.js (with Express or NestJS) is the better fit when the app's core is real-time — live chat, collaborative editing, a streaming feed — because its event loop holds many open connections cheaply. Laravel can do real-time too, via Reverb or Echo, but Node was built for it. The honest split: relational, request-driven business app, pick Laravel; connection-heavy real-time core, look hard at Node.
Where the usual advice falls short
Most "which framework" comparisons rank on raw benchmarks, and that's the wrong metric for almost everyone. The framework is rarely your bottleneck — your database design and caching are. What actually decides the outcome is who you can hire, how good the docs are when a new developer joins, and how long the project will live. On all three, Laravel's size works in your favour, even if a micro-framework wins a synthetic speed test. My rule of thumb after years of this: pick the framework your team can be productive in on day one, then spend your energy on the database — that's where 9 out of 10 real performance problems actually live.