One important difference is how you will pass the decoded JSON data afterwards within your application, objects are passed as reference and arrays are passed as

One important difference is how you will pass the decoded JSON data afterwards within your application, objects are passed as reference and arrays are passed as copy on write, thus if you intent to modify it it can be easer with an object. Another is if you going to merge JSON data and send it further then an object can be easier because that is how the rest of the world views it. However there many more array functions in the standard library than object functions. I think it is generally easier to annotate arrays vs objects with phpdoc. If this blog post is still true today when it was written (2018 PHP 7.2), then arrays are better for performance vs stdClass, but a real class is better than both, but sadly you can't JSON decode into a class directly. https://steemit.com/php/@crell/php-use-associative-arrays-basically-never https://steemit.com/php/@crell/php-use-associative-arrays-ba...