In a new post on his Medium.com site Romans Malinovskis has posted an objective comparison of ORM/DBAL libraries based on his own list. It includes several different libraries from all around the community including Doctrine, Eloquent, Cake ORM and Agile Data.

For many of us, developers, pattern of accessing external data (SQL) is a thing of preference. We get used to different syntaxes and subjectively endorse it. By looking past the individual preferences, I wanted to create a “comparison criteria” that would help PHP community to objectively evaluate data persistence frameworks based on features. As I looked around I haven’t found anything, so I started to work on my own list:

https://socialcompare.com/en/comparison/php-data-access-libraries-orm-activerecord-persistence. I welcome my readers to help me populate and use the table. In this article I explain various features which I’ve used as comparison criteria.

The (lengthy) post is divided up into sections for each of the criteria including:

• Sections and Scope
• Support of Persistence Engines
• Criteria, Scope, Condition
• Query Building
• Single-record operations
• Relations and References

...just to name a few. Each section comes with an explanation of what it is in a library-agnostic way and code examples where relevant. Be sure to check out both the table and the rest of the post for the full details.