If you're looking for a powerful and efficient PHP framework for your web application, Laravel and Lumen are two of the most popular options on the market today. Both frameworks are open-source, backed by active communities, and offer a wide range of features to help you build applications quickly and easily.
In this article, we'll compare Laravel and Lumen side-by-side to help you decide which one to choose for your project.
What is Laravel?
Laravel is a full-stack web application framework written in PHP. It was created by Taylor Otwell in 2011 and has since grown to become one of the most popular PHP frameworks in the world. Laravel is known for its elegant syntax, expressive codebase, and a vast array of features that make it easy to build complex web applications quickly.
What is Lumen?
Lumen is a lightweight and fast micro-framework built on top of Laravel. It was designed to give developers a faster and more scalable option for building microservices and APIs. Like Laravel, Lumen is built with expressive syntax and offers many features that make it easy to build efficient web applications.
Performance
When it comes to performance, Lumen is the clear winner. According to benchmarks, Lumen can handle up to 94,000 requests per second, while Laravel can only handle around 2,000 requests per second. This makes Lumen a great choice for applications that require high throughput and low latency.
Features
When it comes to features, Laravel has a clear advantage over Lumen. Laravel offers a wide range of features that are not available in Lumen, such as Eloquent ORM, Blade templates, and Artisan CLI. However, if you're building a microservice or API, you may not need all of these features, making Lumen a good choice for building lightweight applications that don't require all the bells and whistles of Laravel.
Development Time
Both Laravel and Lumen offer features that make it easy to build applications quickly. However, Laravel's wider range of features can make it more time-consuming to learn and set up, while Lumen's pared-down feature set can make it quicker to get up and running.
Ease of Use
Both Laravel and Lumen have easy-to-use syntax and a large community of developers that can help you troubleshoot any problems. However, Laravel's wider range of features and complexity can make it harder to use than Lumen, which has a much smaller learning curve.
Conclusion
In the end, the choice between Laravel and Lumen comes down to the specific needs of your project. If you're building a large and complex web application that requires a wide range of features, Laravel is the best choice. On the other hand, if you're building a smaller microservice or API that requires high performance and scalability, Lumen is the way to go.
Both Laravel and Lumen are excellent choices for PHP web development, so it's essential to weigh the benefits and drawbacks of each framework to choose the one that best suits your needs.