No offense fellow Laravel developers! But Laravel is a total joke when compared to Symfony.

Symfony components are getting more independed and decoupled from each other. The framework avoids magic as much as possible while promoting usage of interfaces, abstractions and types. And these things affects greatly to the code you write. It makes you to think abstract and modular, instead of procedural and concrete.

Writing decoupled & modular software using Laravel is possible, however there is one caveat: You must to be already good at it. Otherwise, with the practises that Laravel promotes (too much magic, less abstraction) you will struggle to learn basics of modular and managable software.

It's hard to compare, they are both very good. Pick the one that suits you best.

Do you like the magic that Laravel provides you? Or do you like the transparency of Symfony more? Do you like ActiveRecord? ...

One thing that I did notice is that big corporate clients often feel more comfortable with Symfony.