Disadvantages

As you can see, Phalcon is really cool, but like other frameworks, it has its disadvantages, the first of which is the same as its main advantage—it’s a compiled C extension. That’s why there is no way for you to change its code easily. Well, if you know C, you can try to understand its code and make some changes, run make and get your own modification of Phalcon, but it is much more complicated than making some tweaks in PHP code. So, generally, if you find a bug inside Phalcon, it won’t be so easy to fix.

This is partially solved in Phalcon 2 and Phalcon 3, which let you write extensions to Phalcon in Zephir. Zephir is a programming language designed to ease the creation and maintainability of extensions for PHP with a focus on type and memory safety. Its syntax is very close to PHP and Zephir code is compiled into shared libraries, same as the PHP extension. So, if you want to enhance Phalcon, now you can.

The second disadvantage is the free framework structure. While Symfony makes developers use a firm project structure, Phalcon has very few strict rules; developers can create any structure they like, though there is a structure that is recommended by its authors. This isn’t a critical disadvantage, but some people may consider it too raw when you write the paths to all the directories in a bootstrap file manually.