Kevin Coyle
Kevin Coyle

Laravel: The Best Web Framework for 2025

I'm often asked which framework to build web applications in and to be honest, it's usually the same answer. There's just not beating the integration that Laravel has with its constituent parts. The ecosystem is undeniably fantastic and you'll be hard-pressed to find a more comprehensive alternative on the market.

The Framework Fatigue Problem

The thing is, there has always been a latest and greatest Javascript framework that has been up and coming and the best in the market. I'm not disputing that Next.JS has its fans and I can somewhat see why that is -- especially if your alternatives are rolling your own patchwork of libraries sounds unappealing. But it doesn't even have auth. I'm much too old and bad tempered to implement my own forgotten password flow again. You're expected to bring your own authentication provider. Next.js also leaves you in the cold when it comes to how to work with your data layer. Laravel comes with Eloquent, which love it or hate it has to be admired for its...eloquence.

I'd say that Next.js and Laravel aren't quite comparable. Next.js is a lot more barebones than Laravel.

Without going into too much history that I'm just far too lazy to fact check myself on, Laravel's inspiration came from Ruby on Rails and C# .NET. These are true comprehensive frameworks that provide a full feature set.

Laravel has adopted Rails'ses convention over configuration ethos, eloquent was inspired by ActiveRecord with relationships, scopes and soft-deletes (a life saver for sure). .NET devs might find the IoC container and dep injection features within Laravel to be reassuring and enterprisey. Fluent APIs that look somewhat linq-like make an appearance too.

So I would say if you're one of the devs in the above two camps if you gave Laravel a try -- you're probably going to have a good time.

Oh but PHP is for Boomers

Wrong. This ain't your Grandma's PHP. It's come a long way since it birthed out the reverse shell with a GUI (Wordpress). It's been OOP focused now for the past decade or so. Testing and static analysis is front and centre. We have all the nerdy little gubbins you need like:

  • Strict typing
  • Namespaces
  • Anonymous functions
  • First-class errors/exceptions
  • Free Reversi

Also, it's not that much different from Javascript -- fundamentally all C style languages kinda look the same. So I'mm not going to listen to any Javascript devs who see PHP as a totally foreign language.

So What Makes a Framework "Best" in 2025?

My criteria for evaluating a framework are generally as follows:

  • Developer Experience — how easy is it to get started and actually use the framework? How are the docs?
  • Integrated Tooling — what is included out of the box, and what tools do I need to add?
  • Community and Ecosystem — is it full of Stack Overflow neckbeards, or helpful folks who want you to succeed?
  • Can AI use it -- it's 2025, of course I'm going to mention AI.
  • Long-Term Maintainability — will you have to constantly update it, and if you come back to it two years later, is it going to be a bug-ridden mess?

Developer Experience

Getting started with Laravel is easy. The docs are pretty much next level and easy to follow.The only thing you're going to have to install to begin with is php. It comes with multiple start templates that integrate with most frontend frameworks including Vue, React and even their own special one called Livewire. Server-side templating is handled with a language called Blade. .NET devs will be familiar with this as it's even sorta named after their templating engine, Razor.

In all seriousness though the tooling that we have in the Laravel world is amazing. I'll just take a few key examples:

Integrated Tooling

Artisan is the CLI for Laravel. I've probably relied on it more than any other tool in my arsenal. With it you can do almost anything you need to manage your application including creating controllers, views, contracts (any sort of code really) from templates. It's what we used before LLMs wrote everything for us. I can do things like

php artisan make:model Post -a

That'll give you a migration, factory, seeder, policy, controller AND a model. In one command.

PHPStorm is the IDE of choice for some but equally there are plenty of language servers for other text editors including my favourite, neovim.

AI

One of the nicest things that's come out recently is the Laravel Boost MCP. I'll do a more in-depth blog article about this in the future but it's a game changer. It gives your agentic coding agent all the tools that it needs to glide around your codebase with ease. It's tools include the ability to:

  • See all errors, both server and browser
  • Use artisan
  • Search the latest docs
  • Query the database
  • Use artisan tinker to write arbitrary PHP code to explore your codebase better

Maintainability

OK, so this is where it can get a little awkward and not so glowing. Laravel uses Composer. Composer is hardly known for its ease of use although there has been some strides in the past to try and rectify this. npm it is not and unfortunately there's been many a time whereby I've had to fight version clashes in order to get something to composer install. It's also usually quite sensitive to php version updates as well and it's important to try and incrementally update.

I suppose this advice applies to most applications that are built upon other libraries but its just so damn important to keep on top of the updates. It's not, in my experience, as bad as Drupal when you leave it for a few years but don't expect to come back to a repo that's a few years old and a composer install just work.

Saying that as well there's also no getting away from npm as the frontend side of it will use it. So that means double the package managers and double the fun!

Laravel's Comprehensive Integrated Featureset

As I eluded to previously in contrast to Next.js, Laravel aims to be more of a complete solution. You've pretty much got everything you need without having to install third party things like prisma, Supabase etc.

This has the advantage that these are all first class citizens that have a homogenous documentation system and general way of working.

Here's some of the integrated features that you have

Eloquent

Eloquent ORM is Laravel’s built-in solution for working with your database in an expressive, object-oriented way. For instance, fetching all posts from a posts table can be as simple as:

$posts = App\Models\Post::all();

foreach ($posts as $post) {
    echo $post->title;
}

This retrieves every Post in the database, and you can then easily access properties like $post->title directly. Eloquent also lets you filter, update, create, and relate models with compact, readable code.

Blade Templating

Blade is Laravel's templating language, and honestly, it's what makes writing views feel almost fun. It lets you sprinkle PHP directly into your HTML but in a way that's clean and readable. Here's a super basic example to render a list of posts:

<ul>
    @foreach ($posts as $post)
    <li>{{ $post->title }}</li>
    @endforeach
</ul>

You get all the power of PHP, plus nice syntax for things like layouts, includes, components, and even built-in conditionals:

@if ($posts->count())
<p>You've written {{ $posts->count() }} posts!</p>
@else
<p>No posts yet. Time to get writing.</p>
@endif

It's also got first-class support for layouts, so you can keep your code DRY. Basically: Blade makes managing your UI logic feel like you're working with a modern frontend framework, just—y'know—in PHP-land.

Authentication

Authentication in Laravel is refreshingly straightforward thanks to built-in scaffolding. You can spin up a full authentication system (login, registration, password reset) with a single command—like php artisan breeze:install or pick something more feature-rich like Jetstream. Out of the box, it handles user sessions, route protection with handy middleware (auth), and user retrieval (auth()->user()). Want to lock down a route? Just slap on the auth middleware. Need user info in your controller or Blade? It’s always right there—auth()->user()->name. No boilerplate, no drama, just works.

Queueing

Queueing in Laravel is one of those things that just feels right—like it was designed by people who actually use these features every day (because, well, they do!). The idea is simple: you don’t want heavy jobs (emails, API calls, video encoding) to slow down your end users, so you toss them onto a queue and let background workers handle them on their own time.

What's cool is that you can set up a basic queue driver (even just database or redis) in a few lines. Then you write a Job class, chuck your logic in its handle() method, and use dispatch() to kick it into the background:

SendWelcomeEmail::dispatch($user);

That’s it. No fiddling with config files for hours or wrestling “worker scripts”—just one Artisan command to fire up a queue worker:

php artisan queue:work

And since it plugs into things like mail, notifications, and even event broadcasting, you end up with this flexible, robust background job system that scales super nicely. Plus, Laravel gives you Horizon (a beautiful dashboard for queues) out of the box if you’re using Redis—so you can see what’s going on, retry jobs, and keep an eye on everything. Basically: background stuff? Handled. Hassle: minimal.

Task Scheduling

Task scheduling in Laravel is another one of those features that just clicks—it’s built-in, intuitive, and saves you from cobbling together messy cron jobs or external tools. With Laravel’s scheduler, you can define all your recurring tasks right in your code, making it super readable and maintainable. Think of it as a programmatic cron job manager, but way friendlier.

At the heart of it is the schedule method in the App\Console\Kernel class. You just pop in there, and with a fluent, expressive syntax, you can set up tasks to run hourly, daily, weekly, or at any custom interval. Here’s a quick example of scheduling a task to run a command every day at midnight:

protected function schedule(Schedule $schedule)
{
    $schedule->command('emails:send')
             ->dailyAt('00:00');
}

I mean, how easy is that?

Testing

Testing in Laravel is genuinely painless—and supercharged if you use Pest, which is like PHPUnit but with a beautifully minimal API. Out of the box, you can write simple, readable tests and run them with one quick command. Here’s how a basic endpoint test looks in Pest:

it('shows the posts page', function () {
    $this->get('/posts')->assertOk();
});

Seriously: That’s it. No config drama, just write what you want to check and hit go.

The Power of Laravel Ecosystem

Laravel's superpower isn't just the core framework—it's the entire ecosystem of first-party tools that make building, deploying, and managing modern applications a delight. Here are some of the standout complementary tools Laravel offers:

  • Laravel Forge: If you've ever dreaded server setup and deployment, Forge is a breath of fresh air. It's a server management tool for PHP (especially Laravel) that lets you provision, secure, deploy, and manage cloud servers with a friendly UI—think "zero configuration DevOps." Whether on DigitalOcean, AWS, or others, you get SSL by default, scheduled deployments, automated backups, and no more fiddling with NGINX configs.
  • Laravel Vapor: Need to go serverless? Vapor lets you deploy Laravel apps on AWS Lambda, making your application auto-scaling, highly available, and maintenance-free. You don’t have to think about servers at all—just push and go. Perfect for handling unpredictable traffic spikes or going global without babysitting infrastructure.
  • Laravel Nova: Admin panels are a fact of life, but with Nova, creating them becomes elegant and productive. It's a premium admin dashboard for Laravel—just define your resources and Nova gives you CRUD operations, metrics, filters, and advanced relationship management, all with a stunning UI and extensibility via packages.
  • Livewire: Want to build reactive, dynamic interfaces—without writing a ton of JavaScript? Livewire makes it possible. You write Laravel components that automatically sync frontend and backend state through AJAX, combining Blade with powerful reactive behaviors in a way that just feels natural to PHP developers.
  • Inertia.js: For those who prefer a SPA experience, Inertia.js is a game changer. It marries Laravel (backend) with modern frontend frameworks like Vue or React, letting you build full SPA-style apps without needing to build an API. Routing and data are seamless, and you keep server-side rendering and routing logic, too.
  • Horizon: Queues are critical for modern apps, and Horizon brings them to life. It's a real-time dashboard for monitoring and managing your Laravel Redis queues, showing job throughput, failed jobs, retry management, and more—all with beautiful visuals.
  • Telescope: Debugging and introspection for Laravel are next-level with Telescope. It's like the framework's black box: it records requests, jobs, events, exceptions, logs, database queries, caches, and more so you can drill deep into your app’s behavior in development or production.

You don't have to use all of these, but each one are first class citizens in the Laravel ecosphere.

Conclusion

This article is getting a little long now and I think you get it -- I like Laravel and here's the reasons why. It's not to say that all the other frameworks aren't the right solutions for you it's just that this one is particularly good. If you've shied away from Laravel in the past because you're worried about not being able to support PHP. Get started at https://laravel.com