Developed in PHP under the MIT license, Symfony has established itself as the leading PHP framework on the market. Launched as open source by Fabien Potencier in 2005, it now boasts a community of over 600,000 developers worldwide, including over 3,000 active contributors. Symfony is both a framework and a set of components that can be reused at will.

At Smile, we have been following the evolution of Symfony for many years, both for its central role in the open source ecosystem and for the privileged relationship we maintain with SensioLabs, the founding company of the framework.

Our technical team uses the full power of Symfony to design tailor-made business applications that are efficient, durable and perfectly adapted to your challenges.

Why a framework? Why Symfony?

Using a framework, like Symfony, has become essential for facilitating and accelerating the development of web applications. By capitalizing on proven software building blocks, you benefit from considerable time savings while ensuring excellent levels of quality, security, and maintainability of the code.

Symfony serves as the technical foundation for a rich ecosystem: CMS like Drupal, Ibexa, WordPress, e-commerce solutions like Adobe Commerce, OroCommerce, Sylius, Shopware or tools like Akeneo.

Today, it is estimated that 20% of the global web is based on Symfony, one of the top 20 open source projects on GitHub.

Symfony users include large companies like BNP Paribas, BBC News, Amazon, Vattenfall, startups like Blablacar or Spotify, and government organizations like the French Presidency or the European Commission.

Symfony's strengths

Symfony is establishing itself as a strategic choice for web projects thanks to its numerous technical advantages and the maturity of its ecosystem. Here are some of its key strengths:

• A rich ecosystem: thousands of bundles facilitate the integration of advanced features (API, rights management, e-commerce, etc.).
• A robust and modular architecture: each component is independently reusable, allowing developments adapted to specific needs.
• A structuring framework: respect for the MVC paradigm, code standardization and advanced dependency management thanks to its dependency injection container.
• A predictable release cycle: Symfony releases a new major version every two years and a minor version every six months, thus balancing stability and innovation.

Symfony at the heart of modernizing your information system

For several years, Symfony has established itself as a standard for developing secure and modular web and e-commerce platforms. Many clients ask us to integrate Symfony into the heart of their information system modernization strategy, whether for the integration of software components in Symfony or for the development of applications in specific code. Symfony allows them to create robust and efficient internal business applications.

The ideal framework for smooth developments

Symfony stands out for its modularity. It is a set of loosely coupled components, brought together in the form of a distribution. The Standard edition offers a full-stack framework including:

• an ORM (Doctrine),
• the Twig templating engine,
• email management with the Mailer component,
• a proven security component for managing user authentication and permissions.

By strictly adhering to the HTTP protocol and the MVC paradigm, Symfony offers developers a comprehensive development environment with a comprehensive debugging tool. This guarantees them standardized access to the database, controllers, and views. The framework also provides a large library of utility functions.

Security and performance: the guarantee for your applications

Symfony meets the demanding needs of the largest development projects by offering a professional SOA architecture around the Dependency Injection Container component as well as optimal performance with its Varnish-compatible HTTP cache system.

Symfony integrates preventive security measures to combat XSS, CSRF, SQL injection, etc.

Smile & Symfony

A technological choice aligned with our DNA

At Smile, we chose Symfony from the very beginning, convinced by its robustness, flexibility, and perfect alignment with our commitment to open source. The future has proven us right. Symfony has established itself as a benchmark framework for developing custom web and business applications, meeting our customers' performance, security, and scalability requirements.

A long-standing relationship with SensioLabs

In 2019, SensioLabs, the company behind Symfony, joined the Smile group, strengthening our position as the European leader in open source digital. This strategic alliance, based on values of openness, passion, and agility, is a key milestone. It consolidates our commitment to the Symfony ecosystem and our ability to support our customers on Symfony with an unparalleled level of expertise on the framework.

Why does Smile recommend Symfony?

• Proven expertise on large-scale projects : we have supported numerous clients in the creation of critical platforms, ranging from e-commerce sites to strategic business applications, relying on the power of Symfony.
• Strong involvement in the ecosystem : Our 80 experts actively contribute to the Symfony community, developing open source bundles and participating in conferences. The presence of SensioLabs, the creator of Symfony, in the group guarantees you'll receive the highest quality answers.
• A common foundation for many open source solutions : major CMS and e-commerce frameworks such as Drupal, Magento 2, Sylius for which Smile has strong expertise are based on Symfony.
• An ability to adapt to new challenges : with the rise of internal business applications using Symfony, we have strengthened our know-how in IT architecture by exploiting the full potential of Symfony to build scalable and high-performance platforms.

With Smile, make Symfony a key lever in your digital transformation

Thanks to the integration of SensioLabs within the Smile group and our recognized expertise in open source technologies, we are a partner of choice to support your Symfony projects, from architecture to performance, including industrialization.

Whether you want to modernize your information system, design a custom business application, or optimize your web platform, we provide you with the best practices of the framework and our technical expertise to guarantee the success of your projects.

Adopt Symfony

Let’s discuss your Symfony project, contact us !

Are you using another technology and want to switch to Symfony? We've written a white paper with SensioLabs on how to migrate from legacy to Symfony. Download it here.