Sooner or later you will inherit a Symfony 6,093 service, a CodeIgniter 23,248 intranet or a Slim 32,516 API. This section is orientation for that day: what each framework is, whether it is maintained and runs on PHP 8.5, and what it is good at, with versions checked against Packagist 4,624 and each project's site in September 2026. Symfony, Slim, CodeIgniter, Phalcon 730,690 and a copy of this chapter's Laravel 2,157 skeleton were each given the same "hello, bookshop" route on the book's server (PHP 8.5.4), so the figures in A Side-by-Side Comparison compare like with like.