3 razões pelas quais PHP é ótimo para startups

3 reasons why PHP is great for startups

June 3, 2024 Roberto Magalhães

Choosing the right technology stack for your startup is critical. See why PHP could be great for you.

79% of websites running today use PHP in one form or another. And many of them even use PHP exclusively. This means that PHP plays an important role in most modern web development projects, and the risk of the language becoming obsolete is practically nil. This is a big advantage for startups, as most prefer not to run their businesses at the risk of using technology that may not survive for long.

PHP is supported by large and thriving communities of developers and companies, who are always coming up with new solutions and improvements to the language and its frameworks. For a startup, working with PHP means you will be working in a vast ecosystem with a plethora of pre-built tools and solutions already developed for you.

What's more, finding the right people for your team wouldn't be much of a challenge, as there is a large global pool of engineers with a lot of experience in PHP (see our take on how to hire the best developers ).

#2 The best PHP frameworks are great and free

It's been around for so long, it's no surprise that PHP has developed its own ecosystem of comprehensive libraries and fantastic frameworks. They are used not only by startups but also by companies of all sizes to take on even the most complex projects. Why? Because they are open source, well designed, and make PHP development faster and easier.

Symfony is perhaps the best known of them. Most PHP developers consider it to be the most modern and mature PHP framework out there. In recent years, Symfony has become so popular that several world-renowned projects have started using it as a main component of their foundations. This goes for Drupal, Mautic, Magento, Pimcore and many more.

Likewise, the Laravel framework has also made a huge impact on the PHP development community. Although Laravel was based on Symfony, most developers consider it to be unique because of its greater simplicity and efficient design. Many software development projects choose Laravel over Symfony to achieve faster development and at the expense of some architectural compromises that wouldn't matter anyway.

So, if your startup is looking to develop something like an MVP and start working right away, Laravel might be the best choice for you. If you're looking for complexity and scalability on a global level, Symfony is probably the best choice. Either way, hiring top PHP developers is always mandatory!

#3 PHP is used by Big Tech

Although we've talked about this before , there's no harm in revisiting it once again – especially for the purposes of this article. So, if you want to know more about this reason, I suggest reading the article linked above.

With all that said, let's get this straight: PHP leads the technology stack at some of the biggest companies in the world, including Facebook, Wikipedia, WordPress, and Tumblr. Even as enterprise-grade technology stacks continue to increase in complexity, PHP has managed to remain relevant as the best choice for large projects that require robust end-to-end infrastructure.

And when it comes to startups, PHP SDK packages make it extremely easy to integrate widely used services into your software applications. For those who don't know, PHP SDK packages are part of the free, pre-built toolkit that you have access to when developing PHP. With them, you can instantly access the Facebook Graph API, receive payments via Braintree or PayPal, interact with Spotify, integrate AWS, or simply send automated emails.

Odds are, if you want to implement some kind of service on your website, there is already a PHP SDK that can do 80% of the work for you.

The end result

PHP's popularity, huge community, and extensive range of frameworks and tools make it a safe bet for initial software development. Suffice it to say, it should at least be on your list of ideal programming languages for your technology stack. Either way, talking to an expert PHP Consultant will help you clear up most (if not all) of your questions about software development with PHP.

If you liked this, be sure to check out our other PHP articles.