Executives need numbers to get convinced, and it could be difficult to convince them to use symfony. Until today.

Today is really a special day since all the figures match pretty well together. See for yourself:

  • 6 languages
  • 60 applications
  • 600 members
  • 6,000 installations
  • 60,000 downloads

All the counters showed exactly those figures today at 6:17pm French time. Or almost.

Ok, as your boss will probably not buy it, here are a few exact figures:

Languages: The symfony documentation and tutorials are available in English, and a good number of chapters are also available in Chinese, Indonesian, Japanese, Portuguese, and Polish. You may also find French and Spanish translations, but to be honest 8 is not a good number for today.

Applications: The wiki page where everyone is invited to declare its applications built with symfony contains 20 entries. But as we all write applications that are not public, or for clients who do not wish their websites to be advertised for the technology they use, we think it represents less than one third of the truth. To be honest, that's the ratio of applications developed by Sensio that we are allowed to communicate about. So 60 finished applications built with symfony is a minimum.

Members: The Forum counts 638 users for now. Each thread has an average of 4 answers, and there are currently 4933 messages posted (and counting). As a side note, the IRC channel gathers between 30 and 40 people all day long, and the mailing lists are getting more and more active.

Installations: To be honest, we have no way to determine how many times symfony was chosen for a project. We know that the symfony package was downloaded 65 704 times (23% via PEAR, 43% archive download, 11% sandbox, and 23% SVN checkouts), but the upgrades are an important part of these installations. The number of people actually using the symfony framework might be closer to 20,000, but we found the figure 6,000 to be pretty attractive in the set.

Downloads: Ok, it is true that the Ajax shopping cart screencast was only downloaded 58,300 times, but as the recent admin generator screencast was downloaded 6,000 times, the last figure gives a pretty accurate idea of the symfony popularity.

These are the bona fide numbers, and we're totally transparent about them. So that you can compare with the others, and come back once you're sure you've make the right choice.

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