Laravel

Open source (MIT)
85k

Verified Sep 2026

The PHP Framework For Web Artisans

The PHP framework with batteries included: ORM, queues, auth and billing, plus an ecosystem that covers ops.

Laravel is the PHP framework that made backend development feel designed: an expressive ORM, migrations, queues, scheduling, validation, authorization and testing built in, with an ecosystem, Forge, Vapor, Horizon, and first-party packages, that covers deployment and operations. It remains the fastest way to ship a full product solo.

Why founders use it: batteries included is literal. Authentication scaffolding, mail, notifications, billing with Cashier, and an admin panel via Filament mean a one-person team runs infrastructure a five-person team would otherwise build. The framework's conventions keep the codebase legible years later, which is what solo maintenance actually depends on.

A realistic setup: a fresh app with Jetstream or Breeze for auth, Eloquent models with migrations, queues with Redis for slow work, scheduler for cron, and a VPS managed by Forge plus Ploi, or a PaaS like Laravel Cloud.

Trade-offs: the magic hides work, and profiling and reading framework internals become part of the job at scale. Hosting wants PHP-FPM and Composer awareness. Compare with Django for the Python equivalent and Rails for the original convention-over-configuration tradition.