I have tried Laravel, Yii, Phalcon and CodeIgniter, and I found CodeIgniter is so far the best choice for me.
Laravel is elegant, and it has many amazing features as its Blade template engine, Eloquent, Method Injection and so on. But you have to know that all those fancy features will come with a cost, that will be the compromise on framework performance and a steep learning curve. It is easy to use tho, however, if you wanna really understand this great framework or even make some improvements, you need to get yourself well prepared for OOP and design patterns before starting some decent development.
Yii is great, it really has a great balance on both performance and framework architecture design. I have used Yii for several personal projects and it worked pretty well for me. Until the Yii 2.0 being released, oh no... It's still beautiful, but just not as simple as 1.x anymore...
Phalcon is fast, extremely fast. I like the idea that the entire framework is built upon C. Now Phalcon has a new language called Zephir, and the purpose is to eliminate the impediment of writing code in C language for non-C developers. I will definitely use Phalcon for my future projects once the version 2.0 is officially released.
Then I found CodeIgniter, a simple and fast framework with well organized documentation. And I'm already on my way for a new project development after a couple of hours documentation reading. It just makes you feel like flying, dude.
