Choosing the proper frontend framework for creating an eye-catching web application isn’t enough if you want to create an app with high quality, performance, and speed. The appropriate backend framework is even more critical to ensure your application’s viability. You can avoid having to pay through the nose during the development process. Laravel and PHP are two server-side backend frameworks frequently used to build web applications. This blog compares vital factors such as scalability, testing, database support, and more to help you choose the best framework for your current or future project.
Some of these strategies may involve starting from scratch or relying on a specific framework, among other things. Because of the variety of project requirements and the development team’s experience or skills with various frameworks, the answer is never definitive. Both frameworks provide high quality and are stable. PHP is a popular scripting language, and Laravel is a PHP-based framework.
The decision to select one of them is frequently perplexing. If you already have one in mind and want to get started, you can look through Simform’s web application development offerings.
We’ve made it easier for you to choose between Laravel and PHP in this blog by comparing architecture, performance, scalability, testing, and other factors.
An Introduction to Laravel
Laravel is an open-source web framework known for server-side routing, HTML authentication, templating, and other features. It is based on Symfony, which provides reusable PHP components/libraries. Because this is a server-side framework, Laravel allows you to create applications with pre-defined architectures, customized backend logic, web portals, templates, full-stack apps, and manage SaaS products.
Laravel market usage statistics
- Laravel has 0.32% of the market share of all web frameworks available today.
- The number of live Laravel websites has surpassed 783,345, with over 366,427 based in the United States.
- It has 69.5k Github stars, 20.3k live projects, and 597+ dedicated contributors working to improve the real-time framework.
Laravel use cases
- Web applications based on SaaS
- stream on demand
- Web-based e-learning applications
- Web management systems based on stock trading
- Web apps with features for rewards and recognition
- CMS systems that are multilingual
- Apps for self-hosting website performance monitoring
- Popular apps that use Laravel as a backend technology
- Laracasts, an e-learning website, provides a variety of courses as well as a platform where experts answer and resolve technical questions.
- Barchart, a financial portal, benefited from the most recent global market data in stock, currency exchange, trade offers, gold prices, and other areas.
- Asgard CMS, a multilingual modular CMS, offers futuristic ready-to-use modules such as a dashboard, media management, and flexible backend support.
- World Walking, a charity-led healthcare platform, encourages people to walk more by offering reward and recognition programs.
- Laravel is used as the backend support by Neighborhood Lender to serve as a mortgage calculator with a wide range of financial functionalities, making complex mortgage processes more comfortable and straightforward.
An Introduction to PHP
PHP (Personal Home Page) or Hypertext Preprocessor is a scripting language used for server-side web development to automate various tasks. That is to say, It is a general-purpose programming language that integrates easily with HTML codes. PHP allows for developing dynamic web pages, eCommerce web apps, and database-driven applications. This is a free, open-source scripting language that works with MySQL, Oracle, and other database services.
PHP market usage statistics
- According to the StackOverflow Developer Survey 2021, PHP is one of the top ten scripting languages, with a 21.98% share.
- PHP is a server-side programming language for approximately 77.5% of all websites on the internet.
- WordPress powers 43% of all websites on the internet, making PHP the clear choice for 8 out of 10 sites.
- PHP has the most users on the planet, with a market share of 28.56%.
PHP use cases
- Websites that use custom code scripting
- Non-scaling server deployments using Linux, Apache, and MySQL
- Websites that require a lot of image processing
- Internet sites and web applications (server-side scripting)
- Desktop applications (GUI)
Popular apps that use PHP as a backend technology
Facebook: Developed Hack, a new PHP-driven language, as part of the HipHop Virtual Machine (HHVM), an open-source JIT compilation virtual machine.
WordPress: Provides many themes, plugins, template customizations, and an HTML+CSS connection to the database via their software.
Flickr: Used PHP as a foundation to provide image processing for photographers to upload high-quality images with limited bandwidth.
Slack: improved workflow efficiency and increased web request time by reducing program defects.
Etsy: Developed a PHP analyzer called Phan to detect false positives and reduce errors in server-side scripting.
Pros and Cons of Laravel and PHP
Laravel Advantages
- Pre-assembled tools: Providing ready-to-use packages for user authentication and testing APIs simplifies everyday tasks required for building web applications.
- Templating system: Makes use of the Blade templating engine, which provides enormous power for formatting data and creating complex web-app layouts with easy navigation. It enables the addition of new modules and features without affecting the core.
- Automation with Artisan CLI: This allows you to automate any application-specific recurring task. It generates modern boilerplate code to manage databases and migrations and implement custom commands quickly.
- Routing: Reverse routing is a unique feature that allows changes in routes automatically propagate into relevant links. In other words, it generates Uniform Resource Identifiers automatically (URIs).
- Automated testing: PHPUnit provides expressive testing methods for simulating user behavior by requesting the application’s functions. Testing becomes less time-consuming and mechanical in this manner.
- Cons of Laravel Lightweight: Typically, the lightweight feature of this framework is considered an advantage, but in this framework, the lightweight nature leads to excessive backend congestion of database queries, ultimately leading to lower performance with an increase in data congestion.
- Library quality: While Laravel is open-source and supported by a large community, it also leads to an increase in less reliable third-party libraries.
- Community: Because the Laravel community is so large, the number of third-party libraries built and published is significant. It becomes challenging to determine which libraries are reliable and quality certified.
PHP Advantages
- Pre-written Scripts: Includes ready-to-use code that saves time during development.
- Cross-Platform: Compatibility with major operating systems such as Linux, Solaris, UNIX, macOS, and Windows.
- Learning Curve: A simple language with a consistent and logical syntax similar to C.
- Database Connection: Works with popular database services such as MySQL or MariaDB and provides clutter-free data exchange, reducing the time required to build web applications.
- Speed: Increases user engagement and SEO rankings by loading web pages quickly and without interruptions.
The disadvantage of PHP is that it requires an interpreter program to allow the interpretation of codes in computer-friendly language, which slows the speed of websites.
Inconsistency: Inconsistency in structural patterns of frameworks can raise the cost of hiring new human resources.
Speed issues: Developers must add-ons to improve user experience, which slows down the website.
Performance and speed comparison of Laravel and PHP
How is Laravel’s performance?
The performance of Laravel-based applications can impact project success, which is said to be slow. However, the community suggests that it can be improved for better performance if adequately optimized, allowing applications to perform efficiently in less than 20ms.
Cache tags enable applications to quickly load pre-stored information, resulting in a faster response time and improved performance.
How is PHP’s performance?
When compared to its competitors, PHP performs better at higher concurrency. Early language versions could not handle concurrency.
According to a benchmark test, PHP’s 8.0 version generates 1617 requests per second for single concurrency and 9352 requests per second for higher concurrency, say 20. The REST API test has 500 routes and 15,000 translations and returns approximately 100 JSON-serialized objects.
Simultaneously, if you render a large template with approximately 93,700 lines of code, the time will be 53.3ms at 18.7 requests per second for a single concurrency. However, as the concurrency increases, it generates 86 requests per second.
PHP vs. Laravel – Application Architecture
Laravel supports what types of architecture?
Laravel adheres to the Model-View-Controller (MVC) architectural pattern, which allows for the separation of developer roles for a more comfortable development process. In other words, a frontend developer can work on views while a backend developer is working on controller logic.
The MVC patterns also provide complete control over the application, which can help select application-specific routes and customize how your application appears on a global scale. This improves the application’s SEO in the long run. Laravel’s MVC architecture simplifies implementing external APIs and reusing application logic. As a result, creating immutable backend support for any web application is always possible.
What architectures does PHP support?
PHP provides a diverse set of frameworks, including Ubiquity, Zend, Laravel, Codeigniter, CakePHP, and others, that primarily provide MVC architectures that separate the business logic from the representation layer. While the model part assists with the data side of the application, the view part extracts data from the model in response to user requests. Above all, The controller part is in charge of the request execution trigger. Indeed, frameworks such as CakePHP provide ORM (Object Relational Mapping) to reduce SQL dependency for database connections.
Scalability of Laravel vs. PHP
Laravel’s scalability
Popular apps using Laravel for years are scaling up their applications without any constraints. Laravel inherits scalability from PHP to support rapidly expanding businesses. Meanwhile, it can achieve massive horizontal scaling using a good database and load balancer.
Meanwhile, Laravel applications can be scaled as needed by utilizing MySQL, AWS, and some advanced caching techniques.
PHP’s scalability
PHP is a highly scalable scripting language that can benefit small and large businesses. For example, it scales through opcode cache and autoloader by interpreting the code to a machine-friendly language for each request.
As a result, PHP does not need to recompile the entire code with each variation. Because recompilation slows each request’s performance, it impedes scalability. Similarly, the autoloader eliminates unnecessary include statements and improves performance on various proposals.
Laravel vs. PHP – Testing Ease
How straightforward is it to test Laravel applications?
Given that Laravel writes in PHP, numerous testing tools are available to ensure the creation of a bug-free application. However, feeling overwhelmed by the sheer number of testing tools and resources is understandable. Laravel tests code in two distinct levels, known as Unit tests and Feature tests, to make the testing process more comfortable.
However, Laravel comes with extensive testing documentation and all the tools you need to test the application environment at multiple levels, including the ability to conduct mock tests by mocking application codes and events.
How straightforward is it to test PHP applications?
Scalar: type hinting and return-type declaration make it simple to test PHP applications. Therefore, The intent of the code becomes more explicit with scalar-type hinting, and PHP can easily track all the data types returning from a function in the app.
When validating the assertion, you only need one data string because PHP ensures that the function can only accept the same data. It also makes the tests shorter and easier to write, verify, and maintain. At the same time, return type declarations ensure the precision of the function’s return data type. Furthermore, it enables you to set up an error-free testing environment.
