CakePhp is useful if you need to implement a code with different modules (users, payments, pictures). CakePhp is useless if you need to build a quick project that requires a few lines of codes, it's faster to reuse and adapt code from old projects.
The biggest issue inherit in CakePHP, and why we switched to Laravel, is the base configuration of the program. Most people aree that CakePHP uses old (outdated, even dangerous) PHP habits. There is some truth in this: Cake has not been as quick to adapt to the newer PHP versions as they should. I was always surprised that with new major releases, from 2.4 to 2.5 for example, that the minimum version of PHP will never increase. For example, CakePHP only requires version 5.2.8 of PHP, but it would not have been difficult to update the minimum version at least 5.3 when adapting a new version.
Speed - our company had many issues scaling CakePHP to a medium size application software, even with using REDIS/memcache we would still run into many issues with the built-in ORM.
There isn't a whole lot to dislike about the framework, honestly. If I am forced to say something is that sometimes the authors change the directory layout and it's not always easy to deal with. That being said, I've never not been able to upgrade within a few hours.
Sometimes using the artisan CLI - it requires additional tweaking to get it running on non-standard application rollouts.
Originally, it was a decision between Zend, CodeIgniter, and CakePHP for me. I chose CakePHP and used it as my main PHP framework for at least a couple of years before noticing and giving Laravel a fair try. Ultimately I selected Laravel because I felt it fit with my preferred development style, it utilized many of the modern best-practices I wanted to follow, and I felt that it allowed me to build better things in less time that seemed more maintainable. I have used, and still do use, Symfony directly for certain things, but I think of it (and use it) more as a code library than as a full application framework. When I'm building a web application, I tend to prefer Laravel.
