Similar in intent to Smarty, the PHP-Sugar template engine allows for very expressive macros and flexibility and makes the writing of safe and secure templates easy. The compilation engine allows for powerful expressions similar to that of PHP itself. It also features a clean and easy to understand syntax, which was created with the average designer in mind. Sites such as awesomeplay.com and ogrelord.com make use of PHP-Sugar.

Sean Middleditch says that Security is a strength of PHP-Sugar. "For example, output is HTML-escaped by default, instead of requiring explicit escaping like PHP itself, which makes it far less likely to accidentally introduce an HTML or JavaScript code injection vulnerability from user-submitted content."

In the latest version, 0.70, various minor API and syntax changes have been made after testing in a production environment. The loop statement's syntax has changed slightly. Cache control statements have been added. A new array constructor has been added. The internal storage and cache driver APIs have been made more pleasant to use. Very minor performance improvements have also been made.