This is a very generic and personal preference-type question. If I have to choose a framework, I will take the following factors to consider the right framework for use.

1. Does the project need fast performance or faster development time?

2. Are there resources available from a vendor in the specific country where I am working on the project?

3. How is the documentation of the framework? Is it helpful in most of the cases?

4. Is it being used in many projects? Is their major project already built on the framework?

5. How often are there framework version changes? Is there special care about backward compatibility or not?

Performance Required

If I am looking for performance, the YAF Framework is very good, but it is not very common nor easy, but it is very fast in performance. For performance, there is always a learning curve and time needed to develop a solution. It may take more time than others. The reason for the better performance is that it is a C-compiled framework for PHP, so it is really fast.

Faster Development

Laravel is quite good in development time, and it is gaining a lot of popularity. It has also very good documentation and is very compatible with many other libraries.

The downside of most well-known frameworks is that they are designed to be complete. In practice, however, you might not need everything they provide.

Thankfully, modern frameworks are quite modular and you can use only some pieces, ignoring the others (a good example is Symfony which was redesigned to consist of smaller components), but still, there’s a learning curve.

I started building my own framework well before the new wave of Rails-like frameworks appeared. I borrowed ideas from some of them but never decided to drop all that I had done in favour of adopting one of them. My framework only does what I want from it, and it evolves together with the needs of the systems I build with it. I think it’s a nice way to go. Visit series9 and let me know your valuable thoughts.