Zend Framework is a group of PHP written classes. Zend offers a range of standard tools to accelerate the development of Web applications. Zend perfectly responds to the problems generated by customized application development. If your project does not fit in a CMS framework as Drupal, it’s highly likely that you will have to choose Zend. The biggest Zend competitor is Java.

CakePHP is a development PHP framework that offers the MVC model and a certain amount of other development patterns. Very light, but imposing a strong structure to the data model, it enables the quick and clean development of applications based on PHP.