CakePHP vs. Laravel PHP Framework

If you need to create simple CRUD applications using a MVC framework, I could say CakePHP could achieve this. But with frameworks like Laravel on the market, I would have a hard time recommending CakePHP for anything.

Incentivized

Laravel PHP Framework is well suited for a variety of different environments. My custom web application allowed me to build a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system quickly and easily. I had been starting with data from a Microsoft Access database and wanted to get things migrated to MySQL. In some ways, as a PHP Framework, Laravel PHP Framework empowered me to focus on building the application without worrying about many of the under-the-hood matters. I was able to structure building the database, work on the business logic in controllers, and focus on the user interface in the views. Effectively, the structure made me a better programmer and helped me to go beyond functionality and introduce the ability to automatically notify me when users found an error. What really got me excited was the ability to implement unit tests so that when I upgrade or change something, I can quickly test all of the critical functionality of the application by running the unit tests. This gives me the feeling of having an enterprise level stable application.

Incentivized

• Easy learning curve
• Can be used by new developers without paying a formation
• The MVC is pretty well implemented

Incentivized

• Laravel utilizes the best possible PHP standards and coding practices.
• Laravel uses many widely-accepted community libraries and builds upon them, rather than re-inventing everything.
• Laravel has many components available from the community and is extremely easy to build custom components for, either with custom code or by integrating existing third-party PHP libraries.
• Laravel is flexible enough to power pretty much any kind of application I can imagine.

Incentivized

• The biggest issue inherit in CakePHP, and why we switched to Laravel, is the base configuration of the program. Most people aree that CakePHP uses old (outdated, even dangerous) PHP habits. There is some truth in this: Cake has not been as quick to adapt to the newer PHP versions as they should. I was always surprised that with new major releases, from 2.4 to 2.5 for example, that the minimum version of PHP will never increase. For example, CakePHP only requires version 5.2.8 of PHP, but it would not have been difficult to update the minimum version at least 5.3 when adapting a new version.
• Speed - our company had many issues scaling CakePHP to a medium size application software, even with using REDIS/memcache we would still run into many issues with the built-in ORM.

Incentivized

• Laravel is updated regularly, which is great. However, in order to get the latest features, use the newest 3rd party libraries, have the most current security updates, and ensure that the newest features of PHP are usable, you have to continuously upgrade your Laravel application. This costs time and money, obviously, and if you don't stay on top of the updates you will quickly fall behind. This is the case with any open source software, but it needs to be considered for any team considering using Laravel or any other software.
• Because of the size of the Laravel community, there are a LOT of 3rd party libraries. Some of these are great, some are less than great. Sometimes it's difficult to evaluate the quality of a library, making it difficult to trust many libraries. Developers need to be cautious and thoughtful when considering using new software.
• Because of the rapid development of the Laravel framework, the size of the community, and the simplicity of being able to publish content online - it is very easy to find documentation, tutorials, or other "advice" that is not up to date, or that has outdated information.

Incentivized

Laravel PHP Framework has continued to exceed my expectations. It supported me in the development of a high quality and stable web application that is mission critical for the organization. I cannot imagine wanting to use any other tool for web development. Documentation, unit tests, and numerous integration options make using Laravel PHP Framework a natural choice.

Incentivized

As I mentioned earlier Laravel PHP Framework has lot of in built feature as well as there is vast set of packages available to add the features in your application. It has very large community who can help when you feel stuck somewhere. This is why this rating is justified.

Incentivized

Cakephp is more easy to implement and to learn that CodeIgniter. That's why I switched pretty quickly from the first (CodeIgniter) to cakephp.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Negative Impact - we ended up having to rewrite our entire web-application from CakePHP to Laravel.

Incentivized

• Positive: Our delivery time for PHP application is faster than usual.
• Positive: Developers are happy and they write better code with their usual development tools. No tool-upgrade necessary.
• Negative: Initial delivery took 6 months extra and had to rewrite project several times.

Incentivized