Switching from CodeIgniter to Laravel

Definitely switch, yes a steep learning curve but once you learn it you won't look back.

Good support and forum and a lot of good video tutorials.

And very flexible you can use regular PDO all the way up to Eloquent.

I'm definitely a little bit biased, but after having used both CodeIgniter and Laravel, I would definitely recommend giving Laravel a shot. Here are a few of the observations that I've made over the past few years about Laravel:

1. It's possible to do just about anything in CodeIgniter, CakePHP, Wordpress, or any other PHP framework on the market--that's the beauty of code, I suppose. The major difference about Laravel is that it's not just possible to do just about anything with Laravel, it's straightforward and enjoyable. I know it's not a physical, measurable statistic, but writing code in Laravel just feels good.

2. Laravel is easy to learn, but there's always something more to master or dive deeper on. I'm a big sucker for being able to pick up a framework or language quickly, and Laravel more than succeeds at that with the incredible community that surrounds it (I mean heck, Laracasts is a fantastic place to start). What's cool about Laravel is that there's a seemingly endless well of things to dive deeper on and learn more about. One example that comes to mind immediately is the Eloquent ORM that is packaged with Laravel. On the surface, Eloquent is a great way to quickly and easily get records from a database. But just recently, Johnathan Reinink released his Eloquent Performance Patterns course that does a deep-dive into creating ridiculously performant Eloquent queries. That's just one example, but there are tons out there.

3. Laravel is continually evolving. The framework itself is constantly adding great new features (and reworks of standout features from past versions like the Blade rework in Laravel 7), but there is also a lot of awesome work being done by people in the community to add functionality to the Laravel environment. A few examples that come to mind are Livewire, Inertia.js, and Spatie's incredibly large list of Laravel packages.

TL;DR--do it! Give Laravel a go! I think you'll be pleasantly surprised with what you find!