This is a bit different from my regular posts; it's more of an appreciation of Laravel(and PHP). Having worked with many web frameworks like Django, Asp.net, FastAPI, etc... I still come back often to Laravel and love working with it. It's the most productive toolchain for rapid development.
When it comes to building SaaS applications, as a solo dev I need to ship fast, not everything will generate revenue, so you are bound to fail more often than not and need a rapid dev tool to quickly pivot.
Laravel without even installing a single add-on or package, comes with so much functionality out of the box such as mailable's, queue jobs, blade, artisan commands, and more...
SaaS boilerplates are overhyped
If you do a Google search or look in places like Reddit, you'll find loads of Next.js boilerplates. Nothing wrong with Next.js at all, but as a Solo SaaS founder who's self-bootstrapped, having tried a few of these paid products, I don't see the value.
Most just come with basic gluing of components together. Sure, it's lean but having built many web apps before, you'll find most of these starter kits lack real-world features like basic CRON jobs. You need to rely on a third party like Vercel for that !?
Laravel out of the box may be bloated, but if you are a SaaS founder just setting up a new product, this is not a major problem. You can get a couple of $10 VPSs and scale to 1000s of users, at which point if performance does become a problem, you can always optimize queries, cache, and load-balance later.
While there are plenty of paid SaaS boilerplates for Laravel, you'll find often these are not even needed since you can just use one of the starter kits. They already come with Auth, tailwind and even React if you want to use Intertia.
For the backend guys who hate frontend, livewire is a great option or even good old blade using the breeze starter kit.
Laravel has options galore
As eluded to earlier, most of these starter kits or SaaS boilerplates are missing really important components. If you build CRM or business-centric type applications often, one of the major things you need is a solid CRUD builder.
Laravel has plenty of options like Backpack or Filament, even a paid option from the Laravel team called Nova.
If you prefer old-school Bootstrap, Backpack works pretty well. For modern tailwind-based stacks either Filament or Nova are really great options.
With a few CLI commands you can scaffold a table and forms. Additionally, most of these tools include nice features like sorting, searching, and filtering so you don't have to manually write all that boilerplate code yourself. In true Laravel nature, everything is extensible, so you can easily customize any of the generated code or override the route completely to build whatever custom functionality you want.
Deploying your application is also a breeze, you can either provision a one-click image for LAMP on popular cloud platforms like Digital Ocean or Hetzner or you can use paid products from the Laravel team such as forge or cloud.
If you prefer to provision things yourself, there's even a CLI tool to help called Deployer.
What about monitoring? Laravel provides a free open-source tool maintained by the core team called Pulse.
Background jobs? You almost always want to send emails and run other long-running processes in the background. Most languages have an "async" feature but the problem is "async" generally does not persist the task, so if the node/process dies you lose the task, plus you can't distribute the load over multiple servers easily.
Laravel makes this a breeze with Horizon, you can easily push tasks to a Redis queue and distribute them across servers with retrying should a node fail. Furthermore, you also get a beautiful dashboard to monitor these tasks.
Disclaimer: All links included in this post are just because I personally used them and liked them, or are well recognized in the Laravel community. None include paid affiliations.
The beauty of Laravel is that the core team maintains a large selection of tools and packages, making it much less stressful to deal with 101 different dependencies from smaller projects that might run out of funding or stop maintaining the code.
What do I dislike about Laravel?
Okay, to be fair it's not all sunshine and roses. Laravel as mentioned earlier can be bloated, thus the learning curve is much steeper for new developers and can be a tad bit overwhelming too.
Luckily, the Laravel docs are some of the best docs out there and if you are a visual learner, there's also Laracasts. Not forgetting the large community on Reddit and other similar platforms, there's always a friendly Laravel dev to help you out.
Laravel can be magic sometimes; Laravel is razor-focused on making the developer experience as pleasant as possible, which is great! But this also creates a high level of abstraction which can be a pain sometimes when debugging or trying to figure out what's going on under the hood.
Lastly, the framework moves fast. This means they sometimes break things, especially when moving between major versions. Furthermore, they tend to introduce too many new features which can be distracting or annoying if you have been using something for a long time and then they switch to something else.
A good example is "blade". Blade was the first template engine since forever, and still is the default template engine for Laravel but in the recent Laravel 12 version, the installer no longer has an option for Laravel Breeze (they may bring it back). We now can only pick between "React", "Vue" or "Livewire".
To be fair Livewire is built on top of blade, so you can still use blade that way but there are many purists in the community who just prefer the standard blade option and were quite upset by this decision.
The good news is that while Laravel may no longer recommend an option or advertise it, the core team still tends to maintain old packages. So if you picked Breeze or even Jetstream (which is a tailwind-based blade template), you may not get any new features but at least you'll still get security and bug fixes for many years to come.
In summary, while Laravel is a large framework by the number of features it ships, and sure they do tend to move fast, still you have the support and backing of the Laravel core team working tirelessly behind the scenes to keep the framework stable and up-to-date.
As a SaaS builder, this is great, because I know I can rely on a mature framework that will still be around in 10 years!
Top comments (1)
Laravel Is good as much as PHP, zero