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

PHP php.net

PHP

PHP is a popular general-purpose scripting language that powers everything from your blog to the most popular websites in the world.

Wikidata: scripting language focused on web development

Top 1K · #345 English 5 technologies Crawled Nov 6, 2026
Visit 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

jQueryLaravelgetcomposer.orgWordPressPerlPythonGophpMyAdminDrupalphpBB

03 · Nearest neighbours

Alternatives to PHP

Thumbs up if it’s a real alternative to PHP, thumbs down if it isn’t.

Only in English
  1. 01
    phpBB phpbb.com Top 10K English

    open-source Internet forum package written in PHP

  2. 02
    Drupal drupal.org Top 10K English

    Client Challenge

    free and open-source web content management system

  3. 03
    phpMyAdmin phpmyadmin.net Top 10K English

    phpMyAdmin

    database administration tool

  4. 04
    Go go.dev Top 10K English

    The Go Programming Language

    Go is an open source programming language that makes it simple to build secure, scalable systems.

  5. 05
    Python python.org Top 1K English

    Welcome to Python.org

    The official home of the Python Programming Language

  6. 06
    MediaWiki mediawiki.org Top 10K English

    MediaWiki

    free and open-source wiki software, developed by the Wikimedia Foundation

  7. 07
    Perl perl.org Top 10K English

    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.

  8. 08
    WordPress wordpress.org Top 100 English

    Blog Tool, Publishing Platform, and CMS | WordPress.org

    Open source software which you can use to easily create a beautiful website, blog, or app.

  9. 09
    getcomposer.org Top 10K English

    Composer

    A Dependency Manager for PHP

  10. 10
    Laravel laravel.com Top 10K English

    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.

  11. 11
    jQuery jquery.com Top 1K English

    jQuery

    jQuery: The Write Less, Do More, JavaScript Library

  12. 12
    PostgreSQL postgresql.org Top 10K English

    PostgreSQL: The world's most advanced open source database

    The official site for PostgreSQL, the world's most advanced open source database

  13. 13
    Hardened PHP hardened-php.net Top 10K English

    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 […]

  14. 14
    doxygen.org Top 10K English

    Doxygen homepage

    Source code documentation and analysis tool

  15. 15
    W3Schools w3schools.com Top 10K English

    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.

  16. 16
    Node.js nodejs.org Top 10K English

    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.

  17. 17
    Joomla joomla.org Top 10K English

    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.

  18. 18
    pastebin.com Top 10K English

    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.

  19. 19
    R Project r-project.org Top 10K English

    R: The R Project for Statistical Computing

    programming language for statistical analysis

  20. 20
    CPAN cpan.org Top 10K English

    The Comprehensive Perl Archive Network - www.cpan.org

    Perl package repository

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
SaaS tools (verified in DNS)

Stack changes

No changes yet. Each new crawl is compared with the last one, and what PHP adds or drops shows up here.

SimilarSiteSearch

Competitors by meaning, stacks from the source. Data from public homepages and DNS.

About our crawler