Laravel PHP Framework vs. WooCommerce

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

[WooCommerce] does really well for simple stores that don't have a lot of products. It's really easy to set up and get products added so people can purchase them online. It's not the best for really complicated stores with products that need a lot of customization; you have to find 3rd-party plugins to add additional functionality to your store and sometimes those can create conflicts between one another.

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

• Keeps track of product inventory, including details of product variations such as colors and sizes if required.
• Keeps track of orders so that the shopkeeper has one place to log in and see the status and history of orders to her shop.
• Creates shop-related pages automatically. Once you add one or more products, they will automatically appear on your shop home page. Additionally, pages for viewing shopping carts and for checking out are automatically created.

Incentivized

• 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

• Because of how the Wordpress database is structured, WooCommerce isn't great for large or complex e-commerce sites.
• More out-of-the-box options would be nice within the base software.
• Because add-on plugins are developed by 3rd parties, sometimes you get conflicts that break things.

Incentivized

Despite very rare glitches, more connected to an excessive number of plugins, that affect the speed of the site, we are extremely satisfied with the platform, the ability to import and export products, even though we just export them, as we have our proprietary system for updating inventories. We love the ease of upgrading, enhancing, innovating, and the freedom we have to do whatever we want, which is a plus, when you consider Shopify can take down your whole store as they please, if they think you aren't abiding to their TOS or their ever changing set of rules.

Incentivized

I gave it lots of points for being a simple product that instantly gives you a store. Very intuitive and simple for the client to update or implement. Loses LOTS of points when you want to do anything besides just sell stuff (coupons, etc) then it makes you pay big money for the add-ons and makes it difficult and time-intensive to develop your own.

Incentivized

not muh support

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

We were pretty sure we wanted a WordPress site so that we had more control over the site itself, having been burned by third-party vendor sites before. The fact that WooCommerce integrates so well with WordPress was a big selling point for us. Magento would have been too heavy of a lift for our small dev team and we didn't want to rely on Shopify or BigCommerce (though all of those products could have their merits for other projects or clients).

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

• Positive: low cost to start up, and allowed us to start selling right away.
• Negative: better plug-ins have a high cost of entry. For example if you want to do subscriptions you need a paid plugin for it.
• Positive: easily integrates with PayPal and Stripe.

Incentivized