Is PHP Still Relevant in 2025? Business Impact and Strategic Considerations

It’s the same question every year: Is PHP still a good choice, or is it becoming less attractive? Many CTOs and product owners are reassessing their technology stacks in light of contemporary frameworks and alternative programming languages.

Being a PHP team lead helps me to see these issues. Selecting the appropriate technology affects operational costs, security, and long-term scalability in addition to technical considerations. The difficulty is differentiating true changes in technical viability from industry trends.

In this article, you will find:

• A realistic look at PHP’s current standing in the tech landscape
• The risks and benefits of using PHP for new projects in 2025
• Key factors to consider before making a technology switch

The Popularity of PHP Across Industries and Niches

PHP may not be the flashiest programming language on the market, but its entrenched presence in mission-critical systems, modern frameworks, and globally scaled platforms makes it far from obsolete. In fact, PHP continues to deliver value where performance, cost-efficiency, and rapid development matter most.

Industry Adoption: PHP Where It Still Leads

E-commerce Platforms

PHP is the foundation of some of the most popular e-commerce platforms like Magento, WooCommerce, and PrestaShop. These platforms enable businesses to manage product catalogs, payments, logistics, and customer accounts — all backed by scalable PHP codebases.

Content-Driven Websites

Businesses running blogs, documentation portals, or news sites still rely heavily on WordPress, Drupal, and other PHP-based CMSs. These systems allow teams to manage and publish content at scale with minimal technical overhead.

Billing & Invoicing Systems

Small to mid-sized businesses often build or use PHP-based systems for automating invoices, tracking payments, and generating PDF reports. These solutions are lightweight, cost-effective, and easy to customize to specific workflows.

Customer Dashboards & Portals

PHP remains popular for building user dashboards, account management portals, and internal CRMs, especially when fast development and backend stability are priorities. Frameworks like Laravel and Symfony help enforce structure and security for these apps.

API Integration Services

Many companies use PHP to build or consume REST APIs, especially for integrating with third-party systems like payment gateways, logistics providers, and legacy infrastructure. PHP’s mature HTTP libraries and support for OAuth make it integration-friendly.

Email Notification Engines

From password resets to order confirmations and marketing campaigns, PHP is frequently used for email automation. Libraries like PHPMailer and integrations with services like Mailgun or SendGrid make this process efficient and reliable.

Data Processing and Business Logic PHP is increasingly used for backend processing, including cron jobs, ETL pipelines, and middleware services. Studies show that over 60% of PHP-using companies rely on it for data handling and automation tasks, particularly where lightweight scripts are preferred over heavier enterprise solutions.

With improvements in asynchronous processing (via tools like ReactPHP and Swoole), PHP can now handle concurrent tasks, long-running scripts, and even real-time applications more efficiently.

Famous Companies That Use PHP

Despite its age, PHP remains embedded in some of the most visited platforms on the internet:

• Facebook invested in the HipHop Virtual Machine (HHVM) to boost PHP performance and handle billions of user requests efficiently — proving that, with the right optimization, PHP can support massive social ecosystems.
• Wikipedia relies on MediaWiki, a powerful PHP-based engine, to serve millions of daily page views with consistent speed and stability.
• Zoom and Slack both use PHP in parts of their infrastructure — particularly for internal tools, authentication layers, and service orchestration — where rapid backend development and seamless integration are essential.
• Automattic, the parent company of WordPress.com, has scaled its PHP codebase to support millions of dynamic websites globally, demonstrating how PHP can perform reliably even at hyperscale.

These implementations show PHP can scale and evolve to meet enterprise-grade performance standards.

Why PHP Is Still Popular

One of PHP’s most compelling strengths is its pervasive presence across the web. As of mid-2024, PHP is the server-side language driving 76.1% of websites, a testament to its widespread adoption and enduring relevance. This ubiquity is crucial in understanding PHP’s significance.

PHP continuity in existing applications is not merely about preserving old code; it also involves adapting and evolving these systems to meet modern needs.

Modern Frameworks: Keeping PHP Future-Ready

The rise of modern frameworks has reshaped how developers write PHP. Today’s leading tools include:

• Laravel: Elegant syntax, built-in authentication, task queues, API scaffolding, and support for microservices via Laravel Octane.
• Symfony: Modular, enterprise-grade framework used in platforms like Drupal and Magento 2.
• Yii: Lightweight, performance-focused framework ideal for REST APIs.
• CodeIgniter: Favored for simplicity and speed in small-to-medium web apps

These frameworks bring MVC architecture, dependency injection, and unit testing to PHP, aligning it with modern software engineering standards.

While the tech spotlight often shines on newer stacks, PHP continues to run a significant portion of the internet. Its maturity, low total cost of ownership, and modern evolution make it a strategic choice for:

• Teams needing to scale content or commerce platforms
• Projects requiring quick launch cycles with minimal infrastructure complexity
• Businesses looking to tap into a global, experienced talent pool

In 2025, PHP isn’t just alive — it’s thriving in the niches where it performs best.

Why Fintech Companies No Longer Use PHP for New Development

PHP once reigned as the go-to language for building dynamic web applications, powering everything from online blogs to global platforms like Facebook. However, the fintech landscape has evolved — and so has the technology stack that drives it. While PHP remains widely used, especially in content-heavy and legacy systems, modern fintech product development demands more than what PHP is built to offer.

#1 Shift to Full-Stack JavaScript Ecosystems

Node.js blurred the line between backend and frontend, allowing entire fintech apps to be built using a unified JavaScript stack. This is a game-changer for scalability, real-time updates, and performance — all essential in fintech apps dealing with transactions, APIs, and dashboards.

At DashDevs, we prioritize tech stacks that optimize development speed and long-term scalability. A unified language across the stack simplifies code sharing, speeds up onboarding, and enables better collaboration between frontend and backend teams.

#2 Fintech Needs Real-Time, Event-Driven Architectures

Modern fintech platforms are powered by event-driven microservices, real-time data streams, and WebSocket communications. Technologies like Node.js, Go, and Kotlin are built for this. PHP, even with frameworks like Laravel Octane or Swoole, still lags in performance and developer ergonomics when it comes to concurrency and high-frequency messaging.

Processing payments, fraud detection, or handling asynchronous KYC checks in real time requires low-latency systems that PHP isn’t optimized for.

#3 Demand for Cloud-Native, Containerized Systems

Fintech infrastructure today is cloud-first and containerized (Docker, Kubernetes). While PHP can run in containers, it’s not the ideal candidate for building cloud-native microservices. Languages like Rust, Go, and Python offer better memory efficiency, parallelism, and native support for serverless environments.

At DashDevs, our fintech platforms are built to scale horizontally, deploy continuously, and integrate seamlessly with cloud ecosystems — capabilities where PHP doesn’t shine.

#4 Limited Role in AI, ML, and Blockchain

The future of fintech includes AI-driven risk scoring, chatbots, predictive analytics, and blockchain-based transaction layers. Python dominates AI/ML development. Solidity, Rust, and Go are favored for blockchain. PHP simply doesn’t have the same tooling or community support in these fast-growing areas.

Conclusion

For many kinds of web development—especially in content platforms, CMS-based systems, and e-commerce— PHP is still a useful tool. But in fintech, where performance, real-time data processing, and current architecture are paramount, we pick more sophisticated, scalable technology.

Before suggesting the proper tech stack, DashDevs thoroughly assess the needs of every project. Although PHP is no longer included into our fintech development toolset, we still use contemporary, high-performance languages including Kotlin, Go, Node.js, and Python to create safe, future-ready financial products.

We will assist you to create a product that satisfies your industry’s needs, fits your vision, and scales with your company.

Contact us