Comment by jordanlev

I know little about Fuel (just discovered it today), but my take on it is that it is pretty much exactly like Kohana 2.3, but less complex and verbose than Kohana 3 (because Ko3 changed so much from 2.3). Symfony/Symfony2 is a much more heavyweight framework -- much more "enterprisey", which I don't mean in a bad way -- the Symfony folks seem to have a much better understanding of OO patterns and best practices than most PHP folks, and if you're building a very large app that needs to be scalable, extendable, etc., Symfony is the way to go. But for more straightforward CRUD apps or sites without humungous user bases or numbers of pages, Kohana/Fuel is a better fit, IMO. The usual lightweight vs. heavyweight tradeoffs.