Yii is very well suited if you love to program with Object Oriented PHP. This framework uses OOP very well and if you know this pattern you'll love it. The same applies for its MVC architecture and if you come from formal software development education. Also if you are in a bussiness enviroment and need a stable framework. This is the tool for you. It uses very formal scheme but I would like more open and hackable framework, and for this Yii2 is not a good option. Also, if you like to have bleeding edge technologies I don't recommend this framework.
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.
I think is really easy to use, it's not perfect but many developers with great experience will know how to exploit this framework to create great apps!
It's has a really good support based on online documentation and official forums. But sometimes I wish there were a paid service where to report some urgent issues.
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.
Initial learning was hard, it has very specific tools and requires a basic knowledge that takes time to learn. But after that it's really fast and easy to do apps.
When it changed to version 2, servers had to be be upgraded due to the new requirements. Also it required to learn many things that were not backwards compatible.
It saves time by help us to create great applications in less time but very powerfuls.
