It's hard to say which project is more popular based on the number of stars, pull requests, issues, contributors, releases, etc.

Both Laravel and Symfony are the leading PHP frameworks and they're both very popular.

https://github.com/laravel (framework org)

https://github.com/illuminate (Laravel components org)

https://github.com/symfony (framework+components org)

Notably, there is also a difference between the laravel/laravel and laravel/framework -- one has the core code and the other is the public face of the project. Looking at only the former will skew their appearance.

Furthermore, Laravel heavily uses/wraps core Symfony packages (eg: console, http-kernel, routing, process, translation, etc).

Competition between the two is definitely occurring, which is a good thing as they are both comprehensive and modern PHP frameworks.