Why I Still Choose Laravel in 2026

The Annual Ritual

Every year, like clockwork, the hot takes arrive. "PHP is dead." "Laravel is just a monolith framework in a microservices world." "You should be using [insert JavaScript framework that didn't exist eighteen months ago]." And every year, I spin up a new Laravel project, build something great with it, and wonder what all the fuss was about.

It's 2026. I've been using Laravel for over a decade. And I'm not just sticking with it out of inertia or comfort. I'm actively, enthusiastically choosing it. Let me tell you why.

Developer Experience Is Not a Luxury

There's a strain of thinking in software development that says developer experience doesn't matter. What matters is performance, scalability, theoretical purity. And sure, those things matter. But you know what else matters? Actually enjoying the eight-plus hours a day you spend writing code.

Laravel respects your time. The API is expressive and consistent. The documentation is genuinely good. Not "good for open-source," but actually good. When you need to do something, there's usually a clean, well-documented way to do it. When you hit an edge case, the framework gets out of your way instead of fighting you.

Taylor Otwell has said that Laravel is about making developers happy, and I know some people roll their eyes at that. But happiness isn't trivial. Happy developers write better code. They stick around longer. They build better products. Optimizing for developer experience is optimizing for outcomes.

The Ecosystem Is Unmatched

Let's talk about what you actually get when you choose Laravel in 2026.

Livewire lets you build reactive, dynamic interfaces without writing JavaScript for every interaction. I know the "no JavaScript" framing annoys some people, but the reality is that for 80% of the interactive components in a typical web app, Livewire is faster to build, easier to maintain, and perfectly performant. I'm not anti-JavaScript. I'm anti-unnecessary-complexity.

Filament has fundamentally changed how I think about admin panels. I used to spend days building CRUD interfaces by hand. Now I can stand up a full admin panel with custom forms, tables, filters, and actions in hours. And it doesn't look like a generic admin template. It looks good. The Filament team has done something remarkable.

Pest makes testing actually pleasant. I covered this in my last post, but it bears repeating: Pest's syntax is so clean that writing tests feels like writing a specification. it('can create a user') reads like English. That matters for adoption. If testing is painful, people won't do it.

Then there's Forge for deployment, Vapor for serverless, Horizon for queues, Sanctum and Passport for auth, Scout for search, Cashier for billing. The first-party ecosystem covers an enormous amount of ground, and it's all maintained to a high standard.

And that's before you get to the community packages. Spatie alone has probably saved me thousands of hours over the years. The breadth and quality of the Laravel package ecosystem is a genuine competitive advantage.

Pragmatism Over Dogma

One of the things I love most about Laravel is its pragmatism. The framework doesn't force you into a rigid architectural pattern. It gives you sensible defaults and gets out of your way when you need to deviate.

Need a simple app? Controllers, models, Blade templates. Done. Need something more structured? Bring in service classes, actions, DTOs, whatever makes sense. Want to go full DDD? You can do that too. Laravel doesn't judge. It gives you the tools and trusts you to make good decisions.

Compare this to frameworks that are opinionated to the point of rigidity, where deviating from the prescribed way of doing things means fighting the framework at every turn. Or to the opposite extreme, frameworks that give you nothing and expect you to assemble everything from scratch, making two hundred decisions before you can display a form.

Laravel hits the sweet spot. Opinionated enough to be productive out of the box. Flexible enough to accommodate your specific needs.

PHP Is Actually Great Now

Part of choosing Laravel means choosing PHP, and I want to address this directly: PHP in 2026 is an excellent language. Enums, fibers, readonly properties, intersection types, match expressions, named arguments. The language has evolved enormously. The performance improvements from PHP 8.x onward have been staggering.

The "PHP is bad" meme is based on PHP circa 2005. It's like making fun of JavaScript based on pre-ES6. The language grew up. A lot of the people making fun of it didn't notice.

I've used other languages. I've built things in Python, dabbled in Go, written enough JavaScript to have opinions about it. PHP with Laravel remains my most productive stack. Not because I'm too lazy to learn something new, but because I genuinely believe it's the best tool for the kind of work I do.

The Community Is the Secret Weapon

I keep coming back to this, but it's true: the Laravel community is special. Laracon is one of the best developer conferences I've attended. The online community (Discord, Twitter, forums, YouTube) is active and welcoming. When I got stuck on something, I've had package maintainers personally help me troubleshoot in Discord threads. Try getting that kind of support from a billion-dollar framework backed by a trillion-dollar company.

The community also produces an incredible amount of educational content. Laracasts is a treasure. The number of high-quality blogs, podcasts (including, he said humbly, my own, launching soon), and YouTube channels dedicated to Laravel is remarkable for a framework of its size.

This community orientation isn't accidental. It flows from the top. Taylor and the Laravel team actively foster community. They spotlight community members. They maintain an ecosystem of tools that work together seamlessly. They listen to feedback. It's not perfect, but it's a culture that I want to be part of.

"But What About..."

I can hear the objections.

"But it doesn't scale." It does. Laravel runs some seriously high-traffic applications. And if you hit the point where PHP itself is the bottleneck (you probably won't), you can extract specific services into other languages. You don't need to start with a microservices architecture to handle hypothetical future scale.

"But it's a monolith." Yes, and monoliths are fine. For most applications, a well-structured monolith is simpler to develop, deploy, and debug than a distributed system. The industry's obsession with microservices has caused more problems than it's solved for the vast majority of projects.

"But JavaScript full-stack is the future." Maybe. But I can build a full-featured application with Laravel, Livewire, and Alpine.js faster than most teams can agree on which JavaScript meta-framework to use. Shipping beats theorizing.

It's About Building Things

At the end of the day, I choose Laravel because it lets me build things. Real things. Quickly. With confidence that they'll work, that they'll be maintainable, and that I'll enjoy the process of building them.

That's not a small thing. In a world of over-engineering and resume-driven development, the ability to sit down and just build is valuable. Laravel gives me that. It has for ten years, and I don't see that changing anytime soon.

If you're a Laravel developer and you're feeling pressure to switch to whatever's trendy, take a breath. Look at what you can build. Look at the ecosystem around you. Look at the community. You're in a good place.

And if you're not a Laravel developer and you're curious, come on in. The water's fine.