Most startups today know that to be successful, they need to start off with the best technology stack for their purposes. This decision will often stem into other major decisions and is one that can’t be easily reversed. So it’s important to make the right choice early on.
Today, I want to talk about PHP and why developing your startup’s software with it could work out for you—particularly if you’re looking into web applications. And even if hiring a team of PHP developers isn’t in your roadmap, services like PHP development outsourcing can give you everything you need and more in no time. Let’s take a look.
#1 PHP is Everywhere on the Web
Over 79% of websites running today use PHP in some form or another. And many of them even use PHP exclusively. This means that PHP plays a major role in most modern web development projects, and the risk of the language becoming obsolete is practically null. This is a great plus for startups since most would prefer not to run their businesses under the risk of using a technology that might not survive for long.
PHP is backed up by large and thriving communities of developers and companies, both of which are always coming up with new solutions and improvements to the language and its frameworks. For a startup, working with PHP means that you’ll be working in a vast ecosystem with a plethora of tools and pre-built solutions already developed for you.
What’s more, finding the right people for your team wouldn’t be as much of a challenge, since there is a large global pool of engineers with tons of experience in PHP (see our take on how to hire the best developers).
#2 The Best PHP Frameworks are Great and Free
Having been around for so long, it comes as no surprise that PHP has grown its own ecosystem of comprehensive libraries and fantastic frameworks. These are used not only by startups but also by companies of all sizes to take on even the most complex of projects. Why? Because they are open source, well-designed, and make PHP development faster and easier.
Symfony is perhaps the most well-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 begun using it as the main component of their foundations. That goes for Drupal, Mautic, Magento, Pimcore, and many more.
Similarly, 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 its very own thing because of its increased simplicity and efficient design. Many software development projects choose Laravel over Symfony to achieve faster development and at the expense of a few architectural compromises that wouldn’t have mattered anyway.
So, if your startup is looking to develop something like an MVP and hit the ground running right away, Laravel might be the best choice for you. If you’re going after complexity and global-level scalability, Symfony is probably the better choice. In any case, hiring top PHP developers is always a must!
#3 PHP is Used by Big Tech
Although we’ve talked about this before, there’s no harm in going over it once again—particularly for the purposes of this article. So if you want to learn about this reason in more detail, I’d suggest reading the article linked above.
With all that said, let’s make this clear: PHP leads the technology stack of some of the largest companies in the world, including Facebook, Wikipedia, WordPress, and Tumblr. Even as enterprise-level tech stacks continue to increase in complexity, PHP has managed to stay relevant as a top choice for big projects that require a robust end-to-end infrastructure.
And when it comes to startups, PHP SDK packages make it extremely easy to integrate vastly used services into your software applications. For those unaware, PHP SDK packages are part of the free and pre-built toolkit that you get access to when going for PHP development. With them, you can instantly access Facebook’s Graph API, collect payments via Braintree or PayPal, interact with Spotify, integrate AWS, or simply send automated emails.
Odds are that if you’re looking to implement some type of service into your website, there’s already a PHP SDK out there that can get 80% of the work done for you.
The Bottom Line
PHP’s popularity, huge community, and extensive range of frameworks and tools makes it a safe bet for startup software development. Sufficient to say, it should at least be in your shortlist of ideal programming languages for your tech stack. In any case, talking with a specialized PHP consultant will help you clear most (if not all) of your doubts about developing software with PHP.
If you enjoyed this, be sure to check out our other PHP articles.
