Lumen VS CodeIgniter

Lumen is also a micro-framework used for developing PHP-powered web applications with 7.6k stars and 1k forks on GitHub. It is based on the Laravel framework and is specifically designed to build microservices and smaller, lightweight applications. The same team behind Laravel creates it and also shares some of its components. But, It is different from Laravel because it doesn’t offer compatibility with any additional Laravel libraries like Cashier, Passport, Scout, etc.

There's a note right in project page:

Lumen

Lumen is a stripped down version of Laravel for building APIs. This makes it a lightweight framework. I'm currently using Lumen in a project and I want to use this opportunity to share some of the things I've learnt.

Official website: lumen.laravel.com

I think there are micro frameworks like lumen that are far more accessible in the first steps (https://lumen.laravel.com).

see also: https://github.com/laravel/lumen

use lumen. it is exactly what you want. https://lumen.laravel.com/

CodeIgniter is an open-source PHP framework with 18k+ stars and 7.8K forks on GitHub. It follows the Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture and provides a structured way to create and organize code. It provides a set of libraries and an intuitive interface to accelerate PHP web app development.

Over the years I have tried different frameworks, mostly in PHP, like Code Igniter (2010), ProcessWire (2014) and Laravel (2015).

CodeIgniter is an open-source php web application framework created by EllisLab Inc and it is now a project of British Columbia Institute of Technology. The framework implements a modified version of the Model-View-Controller design pattern. It is praised for its performance and the quality of its documentation. It's currently licensed under the MIT License, although the previous version was released under the Open Software License ("OSL") v. 3.0.

Look at the issues and pull requests. It doesn’t support php 8 properly, hence why I call it outdated https://github.com/bcit-ci/CodeIgniter/issues

CodeIgniter

It's been a long time since I wrote any PHP in anger but back when I did, I got a ton of mileage out of CodeIgniter (https://codeigniter.com/). It looks like it's still around and being actively maintained. I can quite clearly remember a number of projects that went from being just an idea to 90% functional in the span of an evening.

I write Python almost exclusively now, but still pine for something like CodeIgniter. Flask is nice because it lets you bolt on whatever you want, but you spend a lot of time choosing, prototyping, and often discarding libraries. Django does a lot of heavy lifting but has (IMO) a very steep learning curve. There doesn't seem to be anything (or at least anything I've liked) in between.