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GTHell's avatar

Is Laravel a good choice for a startup?

My team prepares a startup tech in the education industry and we need to choose a framework. I've been developing with the Laravel framework for 3 years now. The only thing I see as a bad thing about it was the language PHP.

I know this is an odd place to ask such a question but for some of you who probably have more experience than me, does it strike well to go with Laravel for a startup?

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8 replies
Tray2's avatar

Regardless of which framework you choose you will have to deal with the learning of the language it's written in. I think Laravel is a good choice since it's simple syntax and clean approach, not to forget it's documentation and the forum here which is really good.

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martinbean's avatar

@gthell A framework is a tool. Choosing one over the over isn’t going to give a product a better product–market fit or chance of success.

What will give you a better chance though is picking a framework you (and your team) is comfortable with. If you have past experience with Laravel, then you’re going to be quicker in building out features using it. If you pick a framework just because you’ve read somewhere it was “better” but you have no experience with it, then you’re doing the company a disservice by developing something you’re not familiar with, so you’re going to be learning the framework whilst building the product, and potentially making mistake through being unfamiliar with the framework, its features, conventions, etc.

If budget is tight and time to market is important, stick with what you know.

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GTHell's avatar

@tray2 yeah, I kinda agree with that. The design is so well that I cant' use other frameworks as a replacement.

@michaloravec Thank you for sharing! They have point out a really good point

@martinbean Yes, the budget is super tight and deadline is constraint. I favor nodejs framework more because of its ecosystem but my familiarity and experience with Laravel are on another level. I feel super comfortable writing app in Laravel compare to any other framework in many different languages I've tried before.

Thank you all for the input. I will go with Laravel.

jlrdw's avatar

Once you are well grounded in PHP, laravel is a very easy framework. Taylor made it very flexible. But agreed the more you know in php the easier laravel is to learn and use.

And yes to your question.

willvincent's avatar

@gthell If you prefer node, AdonisJS is very laravel-like.. I can honestly say though, having migrated an application from meteor to adonis, and maintaining it daily, I should've gone with laravel instead. The 'async everything' approach tends to be more of a hindrance than a help in most cases. Two specific examples; file i/o and DB queries.

But, Adonis is modeled on Laravel, it's orm is modeled on eloquent.. it's very similar, primary difference being the underlying programming language.. the newest version, 5.0, with a complete rewrite of core code in typescript, is nearly complete.

However -- laravel has a much larger community, and frankly the node ecosystem is no better than PHP.. just different.

cookie_good's avatar

Laravel and its syntactic sugar allowed me to write sophisticated and mission critical web apps all by myself in not a lot of time.

It doesn't benchmark as well as some Java and Java derivative frameworks but it also doesn't need a building full of programmers.

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