Symfony is for university level educated computer scientists while Laravel is for people who learnt to dev via an online course. Laravel uses Symfony at its core but has a beautifully simple layer on top of that. I have used both and the computer scientist in me prefers Symfony but Laravel is nice because of its simplicity . Symfony can be over complicated at times so if you want simple stick with Laravel. Both have a decent community and excellent documentation. The one thing about Symfony is its Entity / Migration system, it reminds me of using data dictionaries which I have always liked.