Contentful vs. Laravel PHP Framework

It's a great all rounder for content projects. It's easy in the basics and powerful in the complex, data heavy scenarios. Extending the platform is straightforward and the SDK gives you everything you need. If you have many many varying content types , it gets expensive and perhaps not the best choice .

Incentivized

I would say that Laravel is not a suitable framework for high-frequency, high-volume, real-time interaction or processing millions of records in batch operations. It shines for standard database web applications (CRUD, Admin Panels, etc.) and is a fantastic multi-developer framework.

Incentivized

• Flexible. This CMS can be easily extended and provide access to dynamic content
• Simple. The WYSWG is very easy to work with and identifying pages and content in the system is fairly easy
• Clean Interface. The interface is clean and uncluttered keeping focus on the content and not other factors.

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

• Contentful uses "references" to allow you to build very modular content. If I have a "slider" content type, I can create a "slide" content type which references a "button" content type, and so forth. This works well, but I occasionally wish there was a better solution for one-off content, like a settings page. Currently, this is done for creating an entire content type called "settings" with a single entry. Not a big deal, but not ideal, either.
• There are a few quirks with GatsbyJS integration, etc, but these issues are being fixed and improved upon very quickly.
• A minor gripe, but Contentful does not have a way to organize fields within an entry. Entries with many fields are somewhat tiresome to scroll through.

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

It is a very easy to use and configure application. I find that it is on the user to manage the content after the models have been created, yet I still do not encounter issues finding or creating new components for our site. It is easy to set up and easy to navigate.

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

Easy to use and much more organized as a single platform versus multi. The layout is clean and easy to read and we don’t have to worry about certain users safe guarding data or content then losing it when they leave the company. It’s a one stop shop for imagery

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

• Contentful has saved us valuable development time that was previously spent doing deploys for minor content updates.
• Contentful has helped us maintain consistent documentation, reducing time needed to review for consistency.
• Can't say we've really experienced any negative ROI impacts from using Contentful, but we've run into some limitations in adding too many content models and the next pricing tier is substantially more expensive.

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