Div was born out of a need felt for an ORM that's as easy to use as eloquent, yet follows the datamapper philosophy of not tying up persistence with data.

Compared to doctrine, its way more simpler and has way less going on under the hood. Anybody who has used both doctrine and eloquent will tell you that eloquent requires way less ceremony, and does way less things than doctrine, but it just does those which are needed most very well. That's what div aims for too.

Compared to eloquent, 1. div offers you a clear separation between persistence and data. All the classes etc that you define are just defining your schema in php. The data that you recieve in the end is just data, Model and Collection objects. You write your business logic around this data, and can easily swap your data sources with something else if needed. And 2. It offers you an orm object (similar to doctrine's entity manager) which you can inject into various services as needed. This might seem like a small thing, but is actually very helpful in proper OOD

You can check it out here https://github.com/kapv89/div