The State of PHP in 2025
17 hours ago
- #PHP
- #Developer Survey
- #AI in Development
- The State of PHP 2025 report highlights PHP's modernization through new frameworks, improved tooling, and AI-assisted workflows.
- Survey participants include 1,720 PHP developers, with 88% having over three years of experience.
- 56% of PHP developers work in small teams of 2-7 people, while 12% work independently.
- 58% of PHP developers do not plan to migrate to other languages; Go and Python are the top alternatives for those who do.
- PHP 8.x dominates with 89% usage, while PHP 7.x drops to 33% and legacy versions (5.6 and earlier) decline to 8%.
- Laravel leads framework adoption with 64%, followed by WordPress (25%) and Symfony (23%).
- PhpStorm/IntelliJ IDEA usage rises to 68%, while VS Code drops to 23%.
- 53% of PhpStorm users rate their IDE highly, compared to 26% of VS Code users.
- Debugging: 59% use var_dump-style approaches, while debugger adoption (e.g., Xdebug) rises slightly to 39%.
- PHPUnit remains the standard testing framework (50%), but Pest adoption grows to 17%.
- 32% of developers do not write tests, highlighting a gap in testing culture.
- PHPStan leads code quality tools (36%), followed by PHP CS Fixer (30%) and PHP_CodeSniffer (22%).
- AI adoption is mainstream: 95% have tried AI tools, with ChatGPT (49%), GitHub Copilot (29%), and JetBrains AI Assistant (20%) leading.
- 72% of respondents are likely to try AI coding agents in the next year, while 11% report organizational reluctance.
- FrankenPHP, backed by the PHP Foundation, emerges as a potential standard runtime for PHP.
- PHP celebrates its 30th anniversary with JetBrains PHPverse, attracting over 26,000 viewers.