Alternatives and competitors
Sites like PHP
The 20 closest programming language alternatives to PHP, ranked by what they actually offer, and the 5 technologies behind it.
Looking for an alternative to PHP? The closest matches are phpBB, Drupal and Lua. We match sites by what they actually offer, from their homepages, Wikidata and a summary by Claude, in any language. Vote on each alternative and leave a short note to help the next person choose.
- Neighbours
- k = 20
- Sites searched
- 4,032
- Vector
- 384-d
- Query
- 14 ms
01 · Entity
About PHP
Summary by Claude
Official website of the PHP open-source scripting language, providing source and Windows downloads, release announcements, security advisories, changelogs and the language documentation.
- Who it’s for
- Web developers and PHP users
- Business model
- Open-source project, non-commercial
02 · Embedding space
Competitor map
Each alternative by how close its vector is to PHP’s (x) and how much traffic it gets, how much of the stack it shares, or where it sits in the embedding space itself (y). Lines split each axis at the median. Hover for the numbers, click to jump to it in the list.
similarity × popularity
03 · Nearest neighbours
Alternatives to PHP
Thumbs up if it’s a real alternative to PHP, thumbs down if it isn’t.
- 01
open-source Internet forum package written in PHP
Very close cos 0.924 - 02
Client Challenge
free and open-source web content management system
Very close cos 0.917 - 03
phpMyAdmin
database administration tool
Very close cos 0.913 - 04
The Go Programming Language
Go is an open source programming language that makes it simple to build secure, scalable systems.
Very close cos 0.910 - 05
Welcome to Python.org
The official home of the Python Programming Language
Very close cos 0.910 - 06
MediaWiki
free and open-source wiki software, developed by the Wikimedia Foundation
Very close cos 0.910 - 07
The Perl Programming Language - www.perl.org
The Perl Programming Language at Perl.org. Links and other helpful resources for new and experienced Perl programmers.
Very close cos 0.908 - 08
Blog Tool, Publishing Platform, and CMS | WordPress.org
Open source software which you can use to easily create a beautiful website, blog, or app.
Very close cos 0.909 - 09
Composer
A Dependency Manager for PHP
Very close cos 0.905 - 10
Laravel - The clean stack for Artisans and agents
Laravel is a framework for building modern web apps and AI agents. Expressive syntax, built-in tools, and everything you need to ship fast.
Very close cos 0.901 - 11
jQuery
jQuery: The Write Less, Do More, JavaScript Library
Very close cos 0.900 - 12
PostgreSQL: The world's most advanced open source database
The official site for PostgreSQL, the world's most advanced open source database
Very close cos 0.900 - 13
Hardened PHP - Hardened-PHP
PHP is far and away the most popular backend programming language today, with more than 80 websites worldwide taking advantage of PHP solutions. All of the most popular CMS platforms – including WordPress, Joomla!, and Drupal (just to name a few) leverage this technology. It’s flexibility and versatility make it a powerhouse programming language, but […]
Very close cos 0.897 - 14
Doxygen homepage
Source code documentation and analysis tool
Very close cos 0.895 - 15
W3Schools Online Web Tutorials
Well organized and easy to understand Web building tutorials with lots of examples of how to use HTML, CSS, JavaScript, SQL, Python, PHP, Bootstrap, Java, XML and more.
Very close cos 0.895 - 16
Node.js — Run JavaScript Everywhere
Node.js® is a free, open-source, cross-platform JavaScript runtime environment that lets developers create servers, web apps, command line tools and scripts.
Close cos 0.892 - 17
Joomla Content Management System (CMS) - try it! It's free!
Joomla! is the mobile-ready and user-friendly way to build your website. Choose from thousands of features and designs. Joomla! is free and open source.
Close cos 0.891 - 18
Pastebin.com - #1 paste tool since 2002!
Pastebin.com is the number one paste tool since 2002. Pastebin is a website where you can store text online for a set period of time.
Close cos 0.890 - 19
R: The R Project for Statistical Computing
programming language for statistical analysis
Close cos 0.889 - 20
The Comprehensive Perl Archive Network - www.cpan.org
Perl package repository
Close cos 0.889
Ranked by score: the cosine similarity of each site’s vector to php.net’s, less a small penalty for generic sites that are close to everything. Highlighted technologies are ones PHP uses too. Votes and comments come from visitors and don’t change the ranking.
04 · Fingerprints
Technology
What PHP is built with, and what its closest competitors use, from its homepage’s code and its DNS records.
Built with
- JavaScript libraries
- jQuery asset https://www.php.net/cached.php?t=&f=/js/ext/jquery-3.6.0.min.js
- CSS & UI
- Font Awesome asset https://www.php.net/cached.php?t=&f=/fonts/Font-Awesome/css/fontello.css
- Analytics
- Matomo page source: _paq.push(
- CDN
- bunny.net header server: BunnyCDN-DE1-1328
- SaaS tools (verified in DNS)
- Google Search Console TXT google-site-verification=O6K8miDfoyFI4IjIQ13207kl978tUNg1HYv3G-bLabo
Stack changes
No changes yet. Each new crawl is compared with the last one, and what PHP adds or drops shows up here.
What competitors use
Across the 20 closest sites.
- Google Search Console 14/20
- nginx · not on php.net 7/20
- Google Workspace · not on php.net 7/20
- Cloudflare · not on php.net 6/20
- Cloudflare DNS · not on php.net 6/20
- jQuery 4/20
- Amazon SES · not on php.net 3/20
- Fastly · not on php.net 3/20
- GlobalSign · not on php.net 3/20
- Google Analytics · not on php.net 3/20
- Google Fonts · not on php.net 3/20
- Google Tag Manager · not on php.net 3/20
- Font Awesome 3/20
- Amazon Route 53 · not on php.net 3/20
- PHP · not on php.net 3/20
- WordPress · not on php.net 3/20