Likelihood to Recommend Laravel is ideally suited for fluent PHP developers who want a framework that can be used to both rapidly prototype web applications as well as support scalable, enterprise-level solutions. I think where it is less ideal is where the client has an expectation of using a certain CMS, or of having a certain experience on the admin side that would perhaps be better suited to a full CMS such as Drupal or WordPress. Additionally, for developers who don't want to write PHP code, Laravel may not be the best solution.
Read full review It's well suited for large eCommerce stores as it requires much effort to set up and the development cost for setting it up is high. It's less appropriate to use Magento where you are looking for quick development and launch of the store. Also, it is required to have a developer or sometimes the entire tech team to manage an e-commerce store, so you may need to hire a few PHP developers.
Read full review Pros Many libraries available which simplify integration of SaaS APIs within your application (eg, MailChimp, Mandrill, Stripe, Authorize.net) Pre-packaged tools to facilitate common tasks when building applications (eg, User Authentication and Authorization, Background Jobs, Queues, etc) Support for a broad set of technologies out of the box (eg, PostgreSQL, MySQL/MariaDB, MemcacheD, BeanstalkD, Redis, etc) Read full review Magento is perfect if our web design client likes a specific pre-made template and wants a fast solution. Magento allows us to customize its open-source code to create additional features and functionality. Magento saves small businesses time and money if they only need a simple solution. Read full review Cons Significant learning curve. You cannot be an expert in a week. It takes many experimentations to properly understand the underlying concept. We ourselves learned it by using it on the job. Too much to soak in. Laravel is in everything. Any part of backend development you wish to do, Laravel has a way to do that. It is great, but also overwhelming at the same time. Vendor lock in. Once you are in Laravel, it would not be easy to switch to something else. Laracasts (their online video tutorials) are paid :( I understand the logic behind it, but I secretly wish it would be free. The eloquent ORM is not my recommendation. Let's say you want to write a join, and based on the result you wish to create two objects. If you use Laravel to do automatic joins for you, Laravel internally actually makes two calls to database and creates your two object rather than making one join call and figuring out the results. This makes your queries slow. For this reason, I use everything except eloquent from Laravel. I rather write my own native queries and control the creation of objects then rely on Laravel to do it. But I am sure with time Laravel will make fewer calls to DB. Read full review Not the simplest of solutions to use or maintain from an end-user perspective Other platforms are better with regards to SEO in our experience Fairly sluggish and slow compared to other platforms without the correct server specification and performance optimization work. Read full review Likelihood to Renew It's the dominant force in the SMB open source market. With the continued support of eBay/PayPal, Magento will continue to evolve and should be a market leader for some time.
Read full review Alternatives Considered Supporting unit testing is bigger plus point in Laravel than any other framework. Developing with Laravel is much easier. Other frameworks have value in market, but Laravel has taken the lead in popularity among PHP developers in recent years. The large community supports you if you have problems. Using Laravel, integration became easy with third-party libraries, but it was costly too.
Read full review In looking at a different platform to migrate to from Magento 1, we looked primarily at Big Commerce, Shopify and Shopify Plus. Our host was very negative about Magento 2, but we determined after a couple years it was due to the fact it had even more complexity (and very different) than Magento 1. Shopify Plus was attractive, but the cost factor for two sites led us back to Magento 2.
Read full review Return on Investment Laravel allows us to rapidly prototype and build complete, scalable applications internally, which saves us time and allows us to have internal tools that fit out precise needs. We use Symfony for a similar purpose, but Laravel is an even higher-level framework that we find saves us substantially more time when building many types of web applications. Laravel solves many of the underlying concerns of building a large application (such as authentication, authorization, secure input handling) in the right ways. It saves us from handling those low-level concerns ourselves, potentially in a way that could take a lot of time or sets us up for issues in the future. It's tough to assign an ROI to this, but I'm sure it has prevented issues and saved time, which both have an impact on our financial situation. Read full review Delays in development leads to missed timelines and opportunity loss. High cost of development and maintenance may currently outweigh the growth. Better handling of customer and order information makes for better customer service. Excellent API has been a boon for integration with our ERP Read full review ScreenShots