What is the difference between installing with Composer and using the pre-built version?

[Benji-Collins]

Are there any real benefits to using the method described here as opposed to using the .zip version available at php-proxy.com? Thanks.

[ghost]

@Benji-Collins maintainability and project size. With future updates you only need to run composer update, vs manually updating different files or accidentally overwriting the wrong ones.

Also, if you're deploying to places like Heroku or Google App Engine, you only need to upload the root files and these platforms will run composer update for you. This vastly speeds up the deployment time.

Additionally if you're backing up your project on GitHub you only have to store the root files since you can get everything in /vendor again by simply running composer update