Be part of JetBrains PHPverse 2026 on June 9 – a free online event bringing PHP devs worldwide together.
Hello everyone
I started my career with Laravel and have been working with it for more than five years—almost six now. Recently, my company has asked me to switch to CakePHP, but I have no prior experience with it. I'm unsure whether learning CakePHP would be a good move for my career or if I should focus on Laravel and explore other opportunities.
Would adding CakePHP to my skill set be beneficial in the long run, or would it be better to continue specializing in Laravel? I’d really appreciate your insights on this.
Looking forward for valuable advice.
sounds like you don't have a choice?
What I would say is, a year or two out of Laravel probably would not harm your laravel prospects, in fact it demonstrates a wider knowledge and learning ability. Laravel would not change much in that time.
@Snapey I can look for a new company. If it is not good for my career.
What I would say is, a year or two out of Laravel probably would not harm your laravel prospects.
Okay? So, I can take this opportunity and work for a year or two?
@shariff Taking this opportunity and working with CakePHP for a year or two won’t harm your Laravel prospects. In fact, it can make you more adaptable and well-rounded as a developer.
If you find that CakePHP isn’t aligning with your career goals after some time, you can always transition back to Laravel.
@shariff Coincidentally, I did the opposite move: I worked with CakePHP for a long time before transitioning to Laravel.
My personal opinion is you should be learning languages, not frameworks. CakePHP is (as its name suggests) PHP-based. If you know PHP the language, then you should be able to pick a different framework written in PHP pretty easily.
Being able to pick up new frameworks and libraries can only be seen as a positive, and by its very nature increases your opportunities because you’d then be able to put yourself forward for Laravel and CakePHP roles, instead of just Laravel roles; and have prior experience to support any job application.
@martinbean Thank you for your suggestion! I appreciate your perspective.
In the long run, I don't think CakePHP would be really beneficial, at least comparing to other solutions. It's a nice addition, don't get me wrong, but if you want something really valuable beside Laravel, it would probably be Symfony in the PHP ecosystem.
@RemiM Thank you for your suggestion!
@shariff I think if your company is pushing for CakePHP, learn it while keeping your Laravel skills sharp by contributing on open source projects.
@shariff Sorry for being strict!
But I would say a big NO!!!
@tisuchi Okay, I understand and respect your suggestion. I'm curious to know what's behind the No if you're willing to share.
@tisuchi Learning new tools is never a bad thing.
@shariff I prefer to invest my time in learning languages and tools that genuinely enhance my development journey. From what I understand, your decision to learn CakePHP is mainly driven by the need to maintain existing applications rather than building new ones from scratch.
Moving from Laravel to CakePHP isn’t an ideal choice, considering factors like ecosystem support, learning curve, job opportunities, and community engagement. Given Laravel’s dominance in the PHP ecosystem over the past decade, I can't recommend any other framework over it.
... Learning new tools is never a bad thing.
I completely agree—expanding your skill set is always valuable. However, @shariff’s question is based on a specific career consideration:
... learning CakePHP would be a good move for my career.
From a career growth perspective, I don't see a strong reason for a Laravel developer to prioritize CakePHP.
@tisuchi Thanks for the clarification!
If it's an old project like cakephp 2 and they need to bring it up to date. It would still be easier to rewrite all using laravel.
In fact in cake, I disliked the pagination so much I wrote my own paginator.
Learn concepts, not frameworks, then you can pretty much hop in and out of any framework.
Please or to participate in this conversation.