Further to the existing answers, you should try both if possible. I use both quite a bit, and over some time, have come to prefer symfony.
but I'm fairly convinced that its not because one or other is better, but because symfony happens to suit the way my mind works better, its closer to what I do when I write software outside a framework, so feels more intuitive. I expect that others may find their mind fits the paradigm of another framework.
Having said that, I do think that cakephp's objects are a weakness, through the use of arrays rather than objects. (This is something that periodically develops into an intense hatred inside me whenever I need to do something that it makes hard ... ! ) They could do exactly the same, but return objects rather than arrays to represent data, and I think most of the issues I have would go away - you'd be able to add extra functionality into the data objects to achieve the things I want to do, rather than writing functions in the existing model class and passing them an array.
