Symfony is the PHP framework that took the modular components approach to its logical conclusion. Most modern PHP code — including Drupal 8+, Laravel's underlying packages, and a long tail of independent applications — uses individual Symfony components (HttpFoundation, DependencyInjection, Console, EventDispatcher, Routing) regardless of whether the team adopts Symfony as a full framework.
Symfony positions itself opposite Laravel: more verbose, more configuration, more enterprise-friendly. Banks, government, and large publishing platforms in Europe use Symfony specifically; most US-based new PHP work picks Laravel for the better developer experience.
