Compared to NativePHP and Symfony UX¶

Two projects stand next to Nativella. NativePHP also runs PHP inside a desktop or phone application. Symfony UX Native, the part of Symfony UX that reaches phones, leaves PHP on your server and puts a native shell around your website.

They make different bets:

• NativePHP turns a Laravel application into a native one, with Electron on computers and native views on phones. It is the mature one, and the one to pick today for Windows, macOS or the stores.
• Symfony UX Native keeps your website where it is, and gives it an app on iOS and Android.
• Nativella takes a PHP application as it is, whatever its framework, and runs it on the user's machine, in the system webview, without a web server. It is the youngest of the three.

All are open source, under the MIT license. NativePHP adds paid extras: Bifrost, its build and deployment service, and premium plugins.

This page compares Nativella 0.5, NativePHP Desktop 2.4, NativePHP Mobile 4.7 and Symfony UX Native 3.7, as of November 2026. What it says about the others comes from their documentation and sources, and from the measures below. Both move fast, so check their documentation before you decide.

At a glance¶

NativePHP¶

It is the closest project: PHP on the user's device, a static build of it from static-php-cli on computers, and a local SQLite database, migrated when the application starts.

On a computer¶

• NativePHP is built on Laravel, and needs it. Nativella takes any PHP application with a front controller, and has integrations for Symfony and Laravel.
• NativePHP ships Electron, so Chromium. Pages render the same everywhere, and every application carries a browser. Nativella uses the system webview, so it has nothing to carry, but one engine per platform, each with its gaps. See What WebKit does not do.
• NativePHP starts a web server on each side of the application, and they talk over HTTP with a key made at each start, which its security guide tells you never to bypass. Nativella has no port to protect, because a request stays in the memory of the process.
• For background work, NativePHP starts Laravel queue workers as child processes. Nativella has one PHP thread, so a slow request holds back the others, and a queue worker needs PHP's command line on the machine.
• NativePHP signs and notarizes for macOS and Windows. Nativella has Debian packages and no code signing. See Distribution.

On a phone¶

• Since version 4, NativePHP renders Blade as SwiftUI and Jetpack Compose views, without a web view (see SuperNative). The app gets the platform's scrolling and accessibility, and its screens are written for it, with EDGE components. A web view stays available, as a component. Nativella shows the pages you already have, so there is nothing to rewrite, and they remain web pages.
• NativePHP builds with Xcode, on a Mac with Apple silicon, and Android Studio. Bifrost does it for you, for a fee. Nativella makes an app from a template, without the tools of either platform.
• NativePHP packages for the App Store and Google Play. Nativella writes APKs, which Google Play does not take, and no Nativella iOS app has run on a device yet.
• NativePHP's native features come as plugins, Composer packages that carry Swift and Kotlin code, and you can write your own. They include push notifications. Nativella's phone APIs are a fixed set, in its template, without push notifications.

Symfony UX Native¶

Symfony UX is a family of front-end packages. One of them compares with Nativella: UX Native, which is experimental too.

It runs nothing on the phone. It is a server-side bundle for Hotwire Native. It detects the app's requests, gives Twig ux_is_native(), generates the JSON the app reads to know how to open each path, and drives its navigation from PHP. The shells are projects you create in Xcode and Android Studio, with Hotwire Native. In the words of its documentation: "Content is all web. Navigation is all native."

So it answers another question than Nativella:

• UX Native needs your server and the network, and every user reaches the same application and the same database. With Nativella there is no server to run. Each user has their own database, on their machine, and the application works offline.
• With UX Native, a change to your pages reaches everyone at the next deployment, without a store review. With Nativella, the project is inside the application, so a change takes a new build.
• Hotwire Native gives native navigation, modals and tabs. Bridge components connect a page to native code, and a screen can move to Swift or Kotlin when it needs to. Nativella has a webview and PHP APIs, with no Swift or Kotlin to write, and none to reach for.
• UX Native is for phones only.

The rest of Symfony UX¶

Stimulus, Turbo, Twig Components, Live Components and the others build pages, and Nativella shows pages. They are not alternatives to it. No demo uses them, so none is tested. Two gaps are known. Turbo reads response.redirected, which stays false (see What WebKit does not do). And nothing streams, so what relies on server-sent events, as Mercure does, gets them all at the end. Events push to the page instead.

Size, memory and CPU¶

Measured on one application: a new Laravel 13 project and its welcome page, packaged for Linux x86_64 with Nativella 0.5.0 and NativePHP Desktop 2.4.0, both with PHP 8.5. The sizes are in MB of 1,048,576 bytes, as in Size and memory.

NativePHP carries Chromium and Node.js, and the Electron executable alone weighs 194 MB. Nativella leaves the webview to the system. WebKitGTK is not in its sizes, and takes 131 MB on a machine that does not have it yet, as a dependency of the Debian package. The memory of its processes is counted.

Take the memory and the CPU as orders of magnitude, from one light page on one machine. Both ran in the same Docker container (Debian 13, WebKitGTK 2.54, Electron 40) on a virtual display, three times each, with the memory read 15 seconds after the first page and the CPU over the next 60 seconds. There is no GPU there, so GPU rendering was off in both (WEBKIT_DISABLE_COMPOSITING_MODE=1 and WEBKIT_DISABLE_DMABUF_RENDERER=1, --disable-gpu), and Electron ran with --no-sandbox. With a GPU emulated in software instead, they take 405 MB and 450 MB. Nativella's 255 MB match what its Laravel demo takes on a real display. NativePHP was not measured on one.

Under load, Nativella's PHP uses one core at most. It has one thread, and boots the framework at each request, until its worker mode. NativePHP Mobile keeps Laravel booted between requests, by default.

On a phone, for the same project:

The gap comes from two choices. NativePHP compresses its native libraries, which Android unpacks at install. That is 43 MB of PHP for 13 MB in the APK, so the application takes more room on the phone than the APK says. Nativella stores its library as it is, 71 MB, and Android loads it from the APK. And Nativella's ICU carries the data of every locale, 36 MB of that library, where NativePHP's ICU data take 2 MB.

NativePHP leaves intl out on Android unless you ask for it, with native:install --with-icu. Nativella's releases carry it, but you can customize PHP to save room. A template with your own PHP, without intl, drops the 36 MB of ICU from every APK made from it. That size comes from the library, as this APK was not measured. It takes a build from the repository, until an application picks its extensions. Neither was measured for memory or CPU on a phone.

With Symfony UX Native, PHP takes the memory and the CPU of your server, for all your users, and the phone only runs the shell and a web view. Its apps were not measured.

Customizing PHP¶

Both Nativella and NativePHP Desktop build PHP with static-php-cli, but they do not swap it the same way. NativePHP runs PHP as an executable next to the application, so another PHP is another file. Nativella links PHP into its own executable, so another PHP takes a build of nativella, which then serves all your applications. Choosing the extensions at nativella build is on the roadmap.

Which one?¶

• Pick NativePHP for a Laravel application that must ship now, on Windows, on macOS or in the stores, or for native views on a phone.
• Pick Symfony UX Native for a Symfony website with accounts and shared data that wants an app on phones and stays online.
• Pick Nativella for a PHP application whose data lives on the user's machine, with any framework or none, when you want your pages as they are, a lighter application on computers, no port on the machine, and no Mac or Android Studio to build for phones. Read Limitations and roadmap first, because it is experimental and Linux is the only computer it is tested on.