It's more a difference in weight and opinion. Laravel carries a lot with it; symfony nearly as much. But you could install composer and install the parts you li

It's more a difference in weight and opinion. Laravel carries a lot with it; symfony nearly as much. But you could install composer and install the parts you like and not need everything shipped together. I agree you're normally inventing a framework, but I left the article feeling like there's a false dichotomy between monoliths and pure PHP as a framework. For what I do, throwing up Slim, Guzzle, and Doctrine works well. You could make the argument that any one of those individually is a "framework", or that collectively I've made a new framework in 3 lines of composer.json by combining them. Point is many (and the article suggests) see framework or no framework as some massive all-or-nothing choice, when picking the parts you want, even after you've built your system out, us also an option.