What is the difference between Ruby and PHP?

Ruby and PHP are both used for web development but differ in design philosophy and typical usage. Ruby gained popularity because it was an easy-to-read language with friendly syntax to developers, making it easier to write clean and maintainable code. On the contrary, PHP is very common in shared hosting environments and drives many websites. For small tasks, PHP is mostly faster; for bigger, more complex applications, Ruby with Rails can provide a much better, organized structure with rich framework features.