Laravel or CodeIgniter?

If you are considering to develop a web application the first language that would most certainly come in to your mind to develop its backend would be PHP. One particular reason is because it is pretty easy to learn, code, handle and there exists a lot of tutorials and forum discussion regarding PHP. However, when the project complexity gets increased, it is not possible to handle them with simple coding. Instead it would need an architecture approach like a Framework.

In PHP, there exists a number of Frameworks which includes CodeIgniter, Laravel, CakePHP, Zend, etc. However, the two most popular ones had been CodeIgniter and Laravel. Therefore, let’s take a lookup at what would be the better solution considering different perspectives

Both Laravel and CodeIgniter are MVC Frameworks. These provide different layers for Routing, Designing and Application Logic.

If you can see the screenshot taken from the google analytics, the trend for PHP frameworks within the last 3 years of time, it clearly shows a rise of Laravel users. So, let’s see how Laravel has been a much popular framework than the others within these few years of time. We would be mainly discussing about the differences in between CodeIgniter and Laravel such that as Developers, or someone who is thinking about whether it would be better to select a specific framework based on a scenario be fine or not.

Both Laravel and CodeIgniter are MVC architecture-based opensource frameworks. As both these frameworks are opensource, they do have a large community gathering. If you search for stackoverflow or any other tech forum you will find a number of active members participating in the discussions. Usually Laravel is believed to be much harder than CodeIgniter to learn specially because of the wide range of features it offer.

The most important feature that most developers tend to use Laravel is that the solution can be modularizedfor the betterment of the development process. Through this edits for the components can be made without hindering major parts of the solution. This process is relatively much easy. There exists Addons to do this is CodeIgniter, but it has to follow a separate procedure.

CodeIgniter Supports a lot more databases than Laravel. For an example CodeIgniter is more useful if you are having an Oracle or MSSQL Server Database (But the later versions of Laravel support MSSQL Server as well). There are a plenty of other databases as well.

Unlike Laravel CodeIgniter is a Light weighted framework. The library required by CodeIgniter core system is very small. However more libraries can be added as add-ons.

As Laravel contains a template engine, it is much easy to build pretty good layouts through dynamic content seeding. It is possible to use multiple widgets available to incorporate both JS and CSS codes along with solid structures. As Laravel is LTS, the updates are more frequent and is patched continuously.

In beginner’s perspective CodeIgniter is simple and quick to setup than Laravel.However,CodeIgniter has some stability in the developers worldwide as it has been there around for around 12 years now.

Considering all the factors, your choice is?