Is Laravel the most complete out-of-the-box framework?

I do a lot of full-stack solo projects for clients. Simple stuff for the most part, nothing crazy. Mainly for clients who want something more custom and more advanced than a typical Wordpress/Shopify site, but don’t have the capacity to hire a boutique agency or an internal team. So they end up with skilled freelance work as a happy medium.

Most projects involve authentication, database optimization, occasionally caching if a high volume site, and occasionally store-based state management if there is a lot of custom functionality. I use Tailwind and Blade for the front-end views, and write my own controllers and database schema.

So far, I am loving Laravel. Coming from React and Next.Js, it is a breath of fresh air. I can easily scan a page and know exactly what the propose of the functions are, and how they should look. In contrast, most React applications I open look like JavaScript soup for the first 10 minutes while I orient myself.

I never knew I needed separation of concerns and functional programming, but coming from JavaScript frameworks, it is so much easier to develop this way. I only have to focus on one thing at a time, and solutions are usually very straightforward to conceptualize since each function is usually only responsible for a few actions. As an added bonus there aren’t properties being passed down through multiple layers of components which makes debugging much easier.

I don’t think I’ll ever go back to JavaScript frameworks (maybe Svelte or Solid), but this framework has truly made programming fun again.

Are there any other frameworks that can really compete with Laravel from an ecosystem standpoint? It has minimal amount of dependencies, good performance, excellent debugging tools, excellent routing and rendering features, an excellent ORM, and many more features that would have been external dependencies in other frameworks.

I can’t believe it took me this long to find Laravel. I thought it was just a back-end framework and had never really looked into it before a few weeks ago, but I am certainly glad that I did.

Taylor Orwell, you are a God among men. Thanks to you I never have to wonder what tech stack is best for a project anymore, the answer will always be Laravel. Does anyone have a “buy me a coffee” link for him? He definitely deserves it. Probably the only time I’ve been so in awe of a single developer other than when I first played Stardew Valley by Eric Barone. submitted by /u/techdaddykraken
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