I just do not understand the fascination with Laravel. When the first version of Laravel was released Symfony was already lightyears ahead.

The only thing Laravel had going for it was that you could take more shortcuts, and it was a pain to integrate into any IDE if you wanted decent autocompletion.

I haven't touched symphony from 1.2 but laravel was a lot simpler to use, especially for begginers. no stupid yaml files, the need to definine everything in yaml before. simpler orm and so on.

When people talk about symfony now they usually mean version 2. Symfony 1 is not comparable to Laravel.

Laravel is not what it used to be either -- Laravel 5 is far more capable/usable than Rails or Django. It's ecosystem is vaster, much stronger community, better docs, faster -- pretty much every state it's better than it's competitors.

Not an end-all be-all, but worth noting: https://github.com/topics/framework

Laravel may, may be better than Rails. But Django is better still.

How so?

The main thing Laravel had going for it was good marketing.

I disagree. Laravel is much less verbose than Symfony and tries to optimize for developer happiness. Couple that with a kick ass video tutorials site (laracast.com) and that Laravel was started at the fall of CodeIgniter giving it a great boost in users.

I've used both Rails and Laravel fairly extensively. The Psy shell and Laravel collections library are quite nice, but not quite as versatile as Rails/pry. However, Ruby has a long way to go to catch up to the PHP interpreter's performance.