Laravel PHP Framework vs. Umbraco CMS

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.

Incentivized

Umbraco CMS is the perfect tool for a company that is looking to keep their website updated. The simple to use tools and templates means updating and creating new pages is easy. The WYSIWYG editor is a nice feature, however, for accessibility, there should be some more guidance on what is suitable to be used on the CMS.

Incentivized

• 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)

Incentivized

• Quick to learn. For most if cases, developer needs to know Razor coding.
• Doesn't require back-end programming.
• Has build in users management (developers, content managers) and members management consoles (users of the site).
• Clear admin tool (especially in version 7)
• Fast.
• Creating code from scratch, so it is easier to create clean code.

• 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.

Incentivized

• Speed for older sites - Umbraco content can load slowly if you have thousands of pages of content. Of course, this would not be a problem for simpler websites
• Complexity - since the product is free out-of-the-box, it will take technical expertise to get Umbraco setup properly

Incentivized

Many end users will be overwhelmed with the admin interface. Some common functions are buried in menus

Incentivized

Occasionally, errors will appear in the admin that make it impossible to work without developer support.

Incentivized

Working in the admin panel (adding / reviewing / editing content) is very slow. The public facing site speed is dependent on what the pages are doing and how well the code was written (whether it is optimized for speed).

Incentivized

Support for Umbraco-owned paid plugins is nonexistent.

Incentivized

Online training is often based on older versions of the platform. So, you'll have to fill in the gaps on your own.

Incentivized

Spend the time to wireframe the content structure prior to diving in. This helps speed the process of implementation and it serves as documentation for end users.

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

Umbraco's templating is far superior than WordPress, Drupal and Joomla, but it's update process is WAY behind those platforms. The release schedule of Umbraco is way to often and most releases are to fix something missed in the previous release and not an improvement or new feature of the CMS

Without significant development, the product does not scale well.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Has helped us to create more engaging pages that push people to complete the online forms
• We have seen more people buy from us since we launched our new look website
• We can easily update the content without waiting for the development team to make changes

Incentivized