Top 3 PHP Frameworks in 2024: Laravel, ThinkPHP, and webman

In recent years, PHP has remained one of the world’s most popular programming languages, valued for its rapid development, security, maintainability, extensive library ecosystem, and reduced manual coding effort.

Alongside PHP’s growth, numerous frameworks have emerged, each offering distinct solutions. Below are the three most popular PHP frameworks in 2024, presented for you to select according to your needs.

1. Laravel

Laravel is a free, open‑source PHP framework that provides a clean, elegant syntax and powerful tools, enabling developers to build web applications efficiently. It offers built‑in routing, middleware, caching, authorization, authentication, and more, allowing developers to focus solely on business logic. Its documentation is thorough, the community is active, and a rich ecosystem of extensions and plugins accelerates high‑quality web development. Laravel follows modern object‑oriented design patterns and uses Composer for package management; the latest stable release is Laravel 11+.

2. ThinkPHP

ThinkPHP is a domestically developed open‑source framework that helps developers quickly create efficient, reliable web applications. Inspired by Laravel, it adopts modern design principles, delivering good performance, rich features, and strong extensibility, making it suitable for small‑to‑medium projects. It offers extensive documentation and examples, strong compatibility, and the current version is ThinkPHP 8+.

3. webman

webman is a high‑performance HTTP service framework built on Workerman, designed to replace the traditional php‑fpm architecture. It delivers ultra‑high performance and scalability, suitable for building websites, HTTP APIs, or micro‑services. webman provides only core functionalities—routing, middleware, session, custom process interfaces—while allowing custom processes to implement any Workerman capability such as WebSocket, IoT, gaming, TCP/UDP, or Unix socket services. The latest version is webman 1.4+.

Key Characteristics of webman (official description)

1. High stability – built on the low‑bug Workerman socket framework.

2. Ultra‑high performance – up to 10‑100× faster than traditional php‑fpm frameworks, roughly double the speed of Go’s Gin/Echo.

3. High reusability – can reuse most Composer components and libraries without modification.

4. High extensibility – supports custom processes to achieve any Workerman functionality.

5. Extremely simple and low learning curve – coding style is similar to traditional frameworks.

6. MIT open‑source license – permissive and developer‑friendly.

Conclusion

Based on current usage statistics, these three frameworks are the most widely adopted in enterprises. While webman offers superior performance, its lower visibility means fewer companies use it today, though its community is growing.

Recommendation Index

If your project does not require extreme concurrency, Laravel or ThinkPHP are solid choices. For performance‑critical applications, webman provides high throughput with a low learning barrier and a design philosophy similar to Laravel, allowing developers to start quickly.