6 Compelling Reasons to Choose CodeIgniter for Your Next Web Project

When you plan to create web applications for your business, which are resourceful and scalable, the entire phenomenon becomes challenging. Top application development companies employ all their resources and best frameworks to stay ahead in the competition. CodeIgniter is one such framework that can take your business to its peak.

CodeIgniter is one of the most used PHP frameworks for web development purposes. PHP is a programming language that has gained a tremendous amount of popularity in recent years. As per a study, PHP is installed in more than two million web servers around the world, and a minimum of 378 million applications run on them.

Since PHP gained its popularity, several frameworks have been introduced into the programming world, some of which are Laravel, Symfony, CakePHP, Yii, and CodeIgniter. Each of these frameworks comes with its own set of functionalities.

This blog will drive your attention towards six compelling reasons for the immense popularity of CodeIgniter. This is a framework that is loved by businesses and developers alike. However, before delving into the benefits of CodeIgniter, you must know more about what CodeIgniter is.

What is CodeIgniter Framework?

Rick Ellis, the creator of the CodeIgniter framework, was disappointed with several PHP frameworks before he created CodeIgniter. Rick’s disappointment is apparent from his statement, “I have spent a couple of weeks researching and installing PHP frameworks, really banging on quite a few of them, and I was absolutely dismayed.”

CodeIgniter is based on the famous model-view-controller (MVC) pattern of development. It is a robust framework that has been continuously evolving since its inception. On 16th January 2019, the latest version released: CodeIgniter 3.1.10.

Developers across the globe extensively use this framework for web development projects. Here are a few reasons that show why CodeIgniter should be a top choice for your next big web project.

Why is Codeigniter a Perfect Choice for Developers?

1. Small in Size

CodeIgniter is a robust PHP framework that has a minimal footprint; that is, it has a minuscule size of just 2MB, including its user guide. However, despite its small size, it is entirely self-contained and does not depend on other frameworks.

According to a recent study published in The International Journal of Current Trends in Engineering & Research (IJCTER), CodeIgniter performs better than Laravel based on ‘Memory Usage.’

2. Faster Execution Time

This is a significant benefit of using this framework. CodeIgniter has an excellent execution time frame. As far as implementation speed goes, no other structure has yet been able to match the speed of CodeIgniter.

3. Easy to Learn

It takes far less time to learn CodeIgniter, compared to all the other PHP frameworks. In addition to that, your developer will type less while using this framework, which invariably means that the chances of errors are less, which in turn reduces the time spent in debugging.

4. Security

“CodeIgniter is fairly restrictive regarding which characters it allows in your URI strings to help minimize the possibility that malicious data can be passed to your application.” (Source: CodeIgniter user guide)


The success of your business hugely depends on how secure your company website is. CodeIgniter, with the help of its security features, helps developers write secure PHP applications. It can very quickly deal with threats like remote code execution, cross-site scripting attacks, and SQL injection. In addition to all these, CodeIgniter’s cookie decryption and encryption features improve the process of product development.

5. Better Documentation

CodeIgniter documents can very well be deemed as at least ten times better than those of other PHP frameworks. It comes with a detailed and comprehensive documentation flow that allows its users to develop applications better.

6. Smooth Integration with Database

CodeIgniter, by default, provides support for databases such as PostgreSQL or MySQL. Even though it does not have support for 3rd party databases like MongoDB, it does come with its own ORM tool.

The Bottomline

The world of web development is growing at an exceptional pace. If you wish to stay a cut above the others in this fast-developing technological landscape and create a niche for yourself in the web development space, leverage the potentials of Codeigniter and see the difference for yourself.