PHP Report Overview: PHP App Development and Deployment Trends in 2024

In our newly-published 2024 PHP Report, we detail the top trends, technologies, and struggles for teams working with PHP in 2024. The report provides data and analysis on everything from PHP version adoption and migration choices, to technology adoption and cloud deployment strategies.

In the first blog of our series on key findings from our new PHP report, we’ll give an overview of the types of PHP applications teams are building and deploying, the types of technologies those PHP apps are integrating with, as well as the overarching deployment strategies for their PHP-based applications.

About the Zend 2024 PHP Report

The 2024 PHP Landscape Report is the latest in our annual report series that looks at the current and future state of PHP usage around the world. Our 2024 PHP report was based on a survey of PHP teams, with over 550 responses from teams around the world. The information below is a partial look at some of the key findings about PHP in 2024 from the report.

If you're interested in a free copy of the report, you can download the 2024 report here.

PHP in 2024: Top PHP Application Types

In our first question for this section, we asked teams to share the types of PHP applications they build or deploy, with respondents able to select multiple entries as applicable. As with the previous two years of our survey, the top three application categories were Services or APIs (78.06%), Internal Business Applications (64.14%), and Content Management Systems (44.94%). Rounding out the top five were eCommerce (35.65%), and CRM / ERM Systems (29.75%).

Top Application Integrations for PHP in 2024

Next, we asked respondents to identify the types of systems their PHP applications integrate with. Unsurprisingly, 94.51% of respondents note that their PHP applications integrate with Relational Databases. Web APIs were the next most common selection with 79.96% of respondents, followed by Filesystems in third at 70.46%.

In our 2023 report, we noted that the breadth of technologies that PHP developers now integrate within their applications is increasing, and we noticed that trend continue for PHP in 2024. Year over year, we saw growth in the percentage of respondents integrating their applications with nearly every category, including Relational Databases, Web APIs, Filesystems, KeyValue Storage, Search Services, and Cache Services. A new entry this year, Job Queue, noted 18.99% integration among respondents.

Key Takeaways From Our 2024 PHP Report

PHP is a glue language for the web, and its wealth of integration extensions give huge flexibility for organizations and developers. When looking through the options, one thing to note is that almost all of these provide either some form of data storage or process deferment; combined, these factors enable scalability in web applications. This is the other factor in PHP’s ongoing popularity and suitability for the web: horizontal scaling. You can spin up more application instances when you need to scale your application up, instead of taking down the application to provision a larger, more capable server. Horizontal scalability helps reduce total cost of ownership, particularly when deploying to the cloud, as you can scale back when your traffic goes down, reducing your costs.

PHP Trends: Application Deployment in 2024

In our next question of our report exploring PHP in 2024, we asked respondents to share where they deploy their PHP applications, with the option to select multiple options as applicable. At the top of the list for PHP in 2024 was On-Premises, with 48.84% of respondents noting that they have at least one on-premises deployment. Running down the list, Amazon Web Services and “Other” represented 39.34% and 22.48% of respondents, respectively. Among those who selected “Other,” respondents listed a number of popular hosting providers, and less common cloud platforms.

When looking at responses by company size, we noted that large companies were more likely than small companies to deploy on premises (64% vs. 45.83%).

Looking at deployment choices dating back to our 2022 survey, we noted that on-premises deployments reached their highest rate in the last three years, while AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Digital Ocean, and Microsoft Azure dropped to their lowest usage rates of the last three years.

Key Takeaways From Our 2024 PHP Report

In the 2023 PHP Report, we saw a cloud provider, AWS, take the top spot for PHP application deployment for the first time; this year has reversed that trend — and in a quite significant way, as this is the highest number of respondents in the past three years indicating on premise deployment as their choice. 

In talking with customers and prospects, we hear many discuss moving back to on premise deployment as a way to reduce operations costs, as well as secure business and customer data. This choice is clearly more popular with larger companies, where they have the space and personnel to run these data centers. 

For those companies choosing to deploy to the cloud, there’s a clear bifurcation of preference based on organization size. While AWS is the lead choice regardless of company size, smaller companies show a preference for Digital Ocean over more “enterprise-y” clouds such as Azure and GCP.

Final Thoughts

Our 2024 PHP Report revealed interesting trends in development and deployment for PHP in 2024. While teams are largely developing the same types of applications with PHP, and integrating with the same types of technologies within those applications, it's clear that teams are having some heartburn around cloud costs, and are reverting back to more hybrid and on-premises focused deployment strategies.

In future blogs breaking down the results of our 2024 PHP report, we'll look at a variety of PHP trends, including adoption and migration trends, container and orchestration, and security and compliance. If you can't wait (or even if you can) be sure to go grab a copy of our PHP report via the link below.

Additional Resources

• White Paper – 2024 PHP Landscape Report
• Webinar – The 2024 State of PHP Development
• White Paper – The 2024 OpenLogic State of Open Source Report
• White Paper – The 2023 PHP Landscape Report
• Blog - PHP Community Support Lifecycle Changes: What Do They Mean for Your Team?
• Blog - PHP Security and Compliance: Trends to Watch in 2024
• Blog - PHP Container and Orchestration Trends to Know
• Blog - PHP Migration Trends to Watch in 2024
• Blog – Building a Modern Web Application
• Blog – Changes to Watch in PHP 8.3
• Blog – Why Good PHP Monitoring Matters