[iillexial]

Laravel is great for prototyping and fast building. If you want to make a big application with Laravel, it's better to use Symfony-like approach with interfaces and DI (you can do it by using Laravel). What I personally do not like in Laravel is their ORM, too much magic calls involved.

[kugelblitz]

Yes, the magic involved in Eloquent ORM, also the central use of Facades or that the models are based on migrations (which uses code comments as a crutch for auto-completion), instead of the migrations being based on the models (how Symfony uses simple PHP objects, from which then Doctrine generates the "missing" migrations).

I can live with both frameworks, but Symfony just feels cleaner and more transparent in its workings without using magic to make things look simpler.