Symfony 4 can be spun up as fast as Laravel 5 and (this is my opinion) Symfony has all the benefits of Laravel with a better ORM (if you want it) and they have never broken backwards compatability in my experience.
Throw in the utterly fantastic documentation (that is both more detailed, thorough and better organised) and I'm not sure why Laravel took off the way it did.
I used Laravel for 3 years at a previous job (from 3 to 4 to 5) and I still think Symfony is the better basis for anything that isn't a relatively small application.
Also Symfony components are genuinely de-coupled, documented on how to use them stand alone and useful for that (I gradually brought them in on an inherited project with few issues).
I have a huge complex behemoth of an application which is written in CodeIgniter 3 with a whole bunch of changes that I have made over the years to the core. To call it CI 3 is a bit of an understatement.
I hadn't upgraded sooner because it had worked, but then due to issues with my stack. I decided recently to start from scratch and upgrade my toolset as well.
So I was deciding to either go symfony or laravel. Laravel won by a huge margin. From the perspective of a newbie. Even though I have 10+ years developing in PHP, I like to debase myself and approach with no baggage.
Laravel has so many more tutorials than Symfony 4 on Youtube. I wanted to learn and very very fast. So going through videos in 2x speed and getting the gist of how things worked was great.
Continuing on, there were many tutorials which had actually built apps using Laravel 5.5/5.6. So I was able to quickly get up to speed using Validation, Eloquent, Passport, Middlewares, Query Builder, etc.
On the documentation side. It's very easy to use and describes simply how to get things done.
Next was that Laravel had VueJS integration. So out of the box, I could have an SPA and use Laravel effectively as an API. Of course, right now I am one developer so 1 codebase is fine. But later on, if I need to split and have two codebases (VueJS front-end, Laravel API), then I can do that.
With Laravel I've gone from writing straight SQL to using the ORM. Which surprisingly for me, reduced my codebase by a significant margin and surface area for bugs.
I have found that there are a lot of Laravel composer packages compared to what I was using before and again makes my life so much easier.
Finally, there is a bit of synergy between Vue and Laravel. For example, I'm able to post a form with Vue using Vee-Validate for the validation. Then get laravel to post back any errors for Vee-Validate to consume. In jQuery and using my old codebase. I had to jump through hoops to get it done and much more code.
I will also say, that I had actually decided to go with Symfony in the beginning. The main reason was that Symfony was more pure and I have developer friends who recommended it as the way forward.
> and I'm not sure why Laravel took off the way it did.
It took off because with Symfony, try as I might. I just couldnt get on with it. It wasn't as pleasant experience with Laravel and honestly. Even if I persisted. The time that I took to go from zero, to duplicating my own stack was a few weeks.
I don't think I could have done that with Symfony. Yes, I could probably achieve the same result with Symfony. But not in the same amount of time.
As still a new laravel developer. I want to be able to deploy new features very fast. I can do this now.
Fair enough, it founds like you found a good fit for your use case (and that's a good thing).
In a year or two when you have a bit of time it might be worth going back and having a look at Symfony anyway, you'll likely find that going from Laravel to Symfony will make more sense than CI to Symfony (underneath Laravel uses a fair few symfony things).
Throw in the utterly fantastic documentation (that is both more detailed, thorough and better organised) and I'm not sure why Laravel took off the way it did.
I used Laravel for 3 years at a previous job (from 3 to 4 to 5) and I still think Symfony is the better basis for anything that isn't a relatively small application.
Also Symfony components are genuinely de-coupled, documented on how to use them stand alone and useful for that (I gradually brought them in on an inherited project with few issues).