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Laravel VS CakePHP

Compare Laravel VS CakePHP and see what are their differences

Laravel logo Laravel

A PHP Framework For Web Artisans

CakePHP logo CakePHP

The Rapid Development Framework for PHP
  • Laravel Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-07-24
  • CakePHP Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-21

Laravel features and specs

  • Eloquent ORM
    Laravel includes Eloquent ORM, which provides a beautiful and simple ActiveRecord implementation for working with your database. It allows for easy interaction with your databases, offering an intuitive syntax.
  • Blade Templating Engine
    The Blade templating engine offers a clean and efficient syntax for writing templates. It provides features like template inheritance and sections, which makes template design more manageable and organized.
  • Artisan CLI
    Laravel's Artisan Command Line Interface (CLI) allows developers to perform repetitive tasks and manage their Laravel project more efficiently with built-in commands for database migration, seeding, and building tasks.
  • Strong Community and Ecosystem
    Laravel has a large and active community that provides an abundance of resources, including packages, tutorials, and screencasts on Laracasts. This ecosystem allows for quick problem-solving and an extensive library of reusable components.
  • Robust Security Features
    Laravel provides built-in security features such as salted and hashed passwords, encryption, and protection against common vulnerabilities like SQL injection and cross-site request forgery (CSRF).
  • Efficient Testing
    Laravel comes with PHPUnit integrated, along with convenient helper methods, making writing test cases and performing automated testing more straightforward. This leads to better code reliability and fewer bugs.
  • Comprehensive Documentation
    Laravel has thorough and well-organized documentation that covers all its features in detail. This makes it easier for new and experienced developers to understand and use the framework effectively.

Possible disadvantages of Laravel

  • Performance Overhead
    Since Laravel is a full-featured framework, it includes many built-in functions and layers that can create performance overhead. For very high-performance applications, fine-tuning may be necessary.
  • Steep Learning Curve for Beginners
    For those new to web development or coming from a different programming paradigm, Laravel can be challenging to grasp initially due to its extensive features and modern PHP practices.
  • Heavy Dependency on Composer
    Laravel heavily relies on Composer for dependency management. While this is beneficial for package management, it can be a downside if you are not familiar with Composer or have issues managing packages.
  • Frequent Updates
    Laravel receives frequent updates and changes in the new versions, which can sometimes lead to compatibility issues with existing projects. Keeping up with the updates can be time-consuming.
  • Hosting Requirements
    Laravel requires specific server configurations and dependencies, which may not be available on all shared hosting services. This can necessitate using a Virtual Private Server (VPS) or dedicated server, which might have higher costs.

CakePHP features and specs

  • Structured MVC Framework
    CakePHP follows the Model-View-Controller (MVC) architectural pattern, which provides a clear separation of concerns, making the application more organized and maintainable.
  • Built-in ORM
    CakePHP includes a powerful Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) system which simplifies database interactions and promotes the use of PHP objects instead of writing raw SQL queries.
  • Convention Over Configuration
    CakePHP follows the 'convention over configuration' philosophy, which reduces the need for extensive configuration and allows developers to quickly set up new projects.
  • Security Features
    The framework comes with built-in security features like input validation, SQL injection prevention, and CSRF protection, which help in building safer applications.
  • Active Community
    CakePHP has an active and supportive community, which provides a wealth of plugins, tutorials, and help through forums and other online resources.

Possible disadvantages of CakePHP

  • Learning Curve
    For developers who are new to MVC frameworks or the conventions used by CakePHP, there can be a steep learning curve initially.
  • Performance Overhead
    Due to its extensive features and abstractions, CakePHP can sometimes have a higher performance overhead compared to lightweight frameworks, especially in high-traffic applications.
  • Limited Flexibility
    While conventions can be beneficial, they may also limit flexibility for developers who prefer to structure their projects differently or need to implement custom solutions.
  • Updates and Compatibility
    Major updates to the framework might introduce breaking changes, requiring existing projects to undergo significant modifications to stay up-to-date.

Laravel videos

Laravel in 100 seconds

More videos:

  • Review - Why Laravel is Still Best in 2018

CakePHP videos

CakePHP 3.7 Standards and MySQL Database Review

More videos:

  • Tutorial - CakePHP 3 Tutorial - part 1: Introduction & Installation

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Laravel and CakePHP)
Developer Tools
83 83%
17% 17
Web Frameworks
74 74%
26% 26
Python Web Framework
63 63%
37% 37
PHP MVC Framework
63 63%
37% 37

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Laravel and CakePHP

Laravel Reviews

Laravel vs. Symfony: A Comprehensive Comparison of PHP Frameworks
Laravel has a vibrant ecosystem with many first-party packages, such as Laravel Horizon for queue management, Laravel Echo for real-time events, and Laravel Sanctum for API authentication, that make it easy to extend functionality without much hassle.
The 20 Best Laravel Alternatives for Web Development
Oh, you bet. When devs talk Symfony, they’re eyeing robustness and a modular vibe that Laravel fans might miss. Its reusable components could tempt even the most loyal Laravel artisans to at least take a peek.
Top 9 best Frameworks for web development
The best frameworks for web development include React, Angular, Vue.js, Django, Spring, Laravel, Ruby on Rails, Flask and Express.js. Each of these frameworks has its own advantages and distinctive features, so it is important to choose the framework that best suits the needs of your project.
Source: www.kiwop.com
Top 5 Laravel Alternatives
However, there are other excellent choices other than Laravel as well. So, let’s check out some excellent Laravel alternatives before you hire Laravel developers India for your web development project. This post provides you with a thorough understanding of the available web development framework choices and their benefits over Laravel. For that, let’s first discuss the...
Framework review: Laravel vs CodeIgniter
Let's start with CodeIgniter first. It focuses on performance and speed. It offers a simple, easy-to-learn syntax, making it ideal for beginners. CodeIgniter uses its own proprietary Active Record implementation for database operations, which provides a simple and intuitive way to interact with data. Unlike Laravel, CodeIgniter does not enforce a specific architectural...
Source: infinyhost.com

CakePHP Reviews

CakePHP vs CodeIgniter: Which PHP Framework is Best for Development?
CakePHP: CakePHP was released in April 2005 by Larry Masters. It is influenced by the concepts of Ruby on Rails and emphasizes convention over configuration, aiming to make web development fast and easy. CakePHP has undergone significant evolution, with the latest versions providing advanced features while maintaining backward compatibility.
Top 5 Laravel Alternatives
CakePHP is less complicated to work with than Laravel. CakePHP’s stated goal is to streamline the processes of developing, deploying, and maintaining Web Apps. The clean MVC layout makes it easy to pick up and use.
Top 10 Phoenix Framework Alternatives
CakePHP offers multiple features like code generation and app scaffolding that accelerates production speeds and saves development costs.
The Most Popular PHP Frameworks to Use in 2021
For example, the CakePHP framework has the Bake command-line tool which can quickly create any skeleton code that you need in your application.
Source: kinsta.com
Top 9 PHP Frameworks For Web Development In 2021
CakePHP is an open-source web development PHP framework. It’s ranked 6th in PHP Benchmarks, just above the Laravel web development framework. The newly released v4.0 comes with a renovated skeleton design and provides APIs to enable developers for rapid application development. On GitHub, it has 8.3k+ stars and 555 contributors. For commercial support, you have cakeDC....

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Laravel seems to be a lot more popular than CakePHP. While we know about 240 links to Laravel, we've tracked only 10 mentions of CakePHP. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Laravel mentions (240)

View more

CakePHP mentions (10)

  • How to Use ServBay to Create and Run a CakePHP Project
    CakePHP is an open-source PHP web framework designed to help developers build web applications quickly. It is based on the MVC (Model-View-Controller) architecture and provides a powerful toolkit to simplify common development tasks such as database interactions, form handling, authentication, and session management. - Source: dev.to / 10 months ago
  • Top 12 PHP Frameworks For Web Development in 2024
    CakePHP is an open-source PHP framework for web development with 8.7k stars and 3.5k forks on GitHub. It offers APIs that enable developers to develop applications quickly. It allows you to create highly secure and scalable web applications, including social networks, eCommerce, and online collaboration platforms. - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
  • Any suggestions for lighter frameworks than Laravel?
    Give https://cakephp.org/ a try. It also is one of the oldest ones out there, so quite mature and stable while being rather lightweight. Serving JSON API seems like a good fit. Source: about 2 years ago
  • Which PHP Framework Should You Use in 2023?
    You can download it and review the documentation here: https://cakephp.org/. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • My Workflow
    As the name of the service says it will work best with Laravel but it is not a problem to modify code from other frameworks to make it work the same way. I have several applications created this way in CakePHP. I have this set to manual after clicking the deploy button, but if you want you can turn on quick deploy and then it will publish the application after a push to the main branch (or another one, depending... - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Laravel and CakePHP, you can also consider the following products

Django - The Web framework for perfectionists with deadlines

CodeIgniter - A Fully Baked PHP Framework

Ruby on Rails - Ruby on Rails is an open source full-stack web application framework for the Ruby programming...

ASP.NET - ASP.NET is a free web framework for building great Web sites and Web applications using HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

Yii Framework - Yii is a high-performance component-based PHP framework best for Web 2.0 development.

Node.js - Node.js is a platform built on Chrome's JavaScript runtime for easily building fast, scalable network applications