Well yeah, if you would pick one technology that even PHP would compare favourably too, it would be Node... my thoughts on Node were always: just because Google

Well yeah, if you would pick one technology that even PHP would compare favourably too, it would be Node... my thoughts on Node were always: just because Google built V8, which makes it possible to run JS fast enough to use it in the backend, doesn't mean that you have to do it. Regarding frameworks: of course PHP has an advantage there, because it's a more mature ecosystem. But frameworks written in PHP like Symfony or Laravel tend to forget that they are based on a scripting language (which years of optimization have made very fast for a scripting language, but still), so using their features extensively will slow down your application...