Flight vs Laravel

What is Laravel?

Laravel is a full-featured framework that has all the bells and whistles and an amazing developer focused ecosystem, but at a cost in performance and complexity. The goal of Laravel is for the developer to have the highest level of productivity and to make common tasks easy. Laravel is a great choice for developers who are looking to build a full-featured, enterprise web application. That comes with some tradeoffs, specifically in terms of performance and complexity. Learning the beginnings of Laravel can be easy, but gaining proficiency in the framework can take some time.

There are also so many Laravel modules that developers often feel like the only way to solve problems is through these modules, when you actually could just use another library or write your own code.

Pros compared to Flight

  • Laravel has a huge ecosystem of developers and modules that can be used to solve common problems.
  • Laravel has a full-featured ORM that can be used to interact with your database.
  • Laravel has an insane amount of documentation and tutorials that can be used to learn the framework.
  • Laravel has a built-in authentication system that can be used to secure your application.
  • Laravel has podcasts, conferences, meetings, videos, and other resources that can be used to learn the framework.
  • Laravel is geared towards a seasoned developer who is looking to build a full-featured, enterprise web application.

Cons compared to Flight

  • Laravel has a lot more going on underneath the hood than Flight does. This comes at a dramatic cost in terms of performance. See the TechEmpower benchmarks for more information.
  • Flight is geared towards a developer who is looking to build a lightweight, fast, and easy to use web application.
  • Flight is geared towards simplicity and ease of use.
  • One of Flight's core features is that it does it's best to maintain backwards compatibility. Laravel causes much frustration between major versions.
  • Flight is meant for developers who are venturing into the land of frameworks for the first time.
  • Flight has no dependencies, whereas Laravel has an atrocious amount of dependencies
  • Flight can also do enterprise level applications, but it does not have as much boilerplate code as Laravel does. It will also require more discipline on the part of the developer to keep things organized and well-structured.
  • Flight gives the developer more control over the application, whereas Laravel has gobs of magic behind the scenes that can be frustrating.