Doctrine findBy 'does not equal'

There is no built-in method that allows what you intend to do.

You have to add a method to your repository, like this:

public function getWhatYouWant()
{
    $qb = $this->createQueryBuilder('u');
    $qb->where('u.id != :identifier')
       ->setParameter('identifier', 1);

    return $qb->getQuery()
          ->getResult();
}

Hope this helps.

There is now a an approach to do this, using Doctrine's Criteria.

A full example can be seen in How to use a findBy method with comparative criteria, but a brief answer follows.

use \Doctrine\Common\Collections\Criteria;

// Add a not equals parameter to your criteria
$criteria = new Criteria();
$criteria->where(Criteria::expr()->neq('prize', 200));

// Find all from the repository matching your criteria
$result = $entityRepository->matching($criteria);