Laravel vs. Yii — What's the Difference?

Laravel is a free, open-source PHP web framework, created by Taylor Otwell and intended for the development of web applications following the model–view–controller (MVC) architectural pattern and based on Symfony. Some of the features of Laravel are a modular packaging system with a dedicated dependency manager, different ways for accessing relational databases, utilities that aid in application deployment and maintenance, and its orientation toward syntactic sugar.The source code of Laravel is hosted on GitHub and licensed under the terms of MIT License.

Yii is an open source, object-oriented, component-based MVC PHP web application framework. Yii is pronounced as "Yee" or [ji:] and in Chinese it means "simple and evolutionary" and it can be an acronym for "Yes It Is!".