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It's a difference in approach. Propel is an ActiveRecord implementation while Doctrine2 is based on DataMapper. ActiveRecord: 1 record in the database equals 1 object in PHP. It's easily recognizable because almost always it will have all it's data manipulation methods on the model instances that also model the data from the database. Thus syntax like Model_Example::find(1) or $example->save() DataMapper: makes a division between the logic that is specific to storage engine and the logic that is specific to the data you're working with. This means a bit more abstraction. It is most often recognized by having 'Entity' classes that model the data and other classes that contain the logic for storing that data. My personal preference is the DataMapper pattern as it is a lot clainer, and thus I prefer Doctrine.

That is not related to the design pattern being used by the ORM, those are implementation features, ORM's based on both patterns can do that. Read http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dd569757.aspx to get an idea of the concepts behind both patterns. From the outside, the main difference is that: - Active record uses a single object to hold both logic and data. Data is therefore closely tied to the logic provided (i.e. database access). - Datamapper uses separate objects for data (entity objects), data related logic and ORM logic. You therefore have methods that operate on the data, and methods that interact with the data (the traditional ORM methods like save). So the datamapper pattern provides more abstraction, and separation of concerns. It would for example be a lot easier to swap the ORM database logic with ORM rest api logic, the data objects would be blisfully unaware of that.