I worked with Laravel for a independent project for a few months. It seems very nice in the beginning. However, as the level of customization and refinement increased the more time I spent working around all the magic than actually building features. In contrast Symfony has much less magic going one and is somewhat easier to customize in my opinion. Not to mention i think Symfony enforces a better structure from the start. Especially by including Doctrine. I think Doctrine is a much better model layer than Eloquent. The problem with Eloquent becomes very clear when you domain isn’t an exact 1:1 relationship with the database. In contrast the structure of a true ORM like Doctrine supports abstracted domains very well. Not to mention I think I prefer configuration over code and Symfony favors the former – configuration. I don’t think you can go wrong with either but after having used Laravel I think I would prefer Symfony. Laravel does have a lot of cruft in it but when those things are needed they come in very handy. So it just depends.