Twig

Twig is Symfony's template engine — clean syntax, template inheritance, auto-escaping, and sandboxing. It's what Smarty should have been. For server-rendered PHP applications, Twig is the right choice.

Twig made Smarty obsolete in the PHP ecosystem. The syntax is cleaner, the security defaults are better, and the integration with Symfony is seamless. For PHP projects that still use server-side rendering, Twig is the standard. The Hold position reflects the broader move away from server-side templates toward React and component-based frontends.