- Application
- Authentication
- Authorization
- Command-Line Interface
- Components
- Database
- Encryption
- Enterprise
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Who is Laravel?
Laravel is an open-source PHP web application framework that provides a model-view-controller architecture, an object-relational mapping layer, and a command-line toolkit for building server-side web applications and APIs.
- Open-source PHP web application framework
- Model-view-controller application architecture
- Eloquent object-relational mapping and database migrations
- Blade templating engine and JSON API development tooling
- Queues, task scheduling, authentication, and Artisan command-line interface
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More About Laravel
Laravel is developed and maintained by Laravel LLC with contributions from an open-source community, and it is distributed under the MIT license. In enterprise environments, it is typically used to build internal business applications, customer portals, content management systems, and backend services that expose RESTful or JSON APIs. Its service container, middleware pipeline, and service providers support dependency injection and separation of concerns in larger codebases.
The framework is built on components from the Symfony ecosystem and follows PHP-FIG standards such as PSR-4 autoloading. Composer manages dependencies, and PHPUnit and Pest are commonly used for automated testing. Laravel applications are commonly deployed on Linux servers running PHP-FPM behind Nginx or Apache, on containerized platforms, or on managed hosting environments that support PHP runtimes.
Laravel's conventions reduce boilerplate and shorten development cycles, which lowers the cost of building and maintaining web applications. Its built-in capabilities for authentication, authorization, encryption, task scheduling, queued jobs, event broadcasting, and database migrations address common requirements without a separate package for each. Organizations evaluating server-side frameworks often compare Laravel with Symfony, Ruby on Rails, and Django, and the choice typically depends on the language standards of the existing engineering team and the required ecosystem.
Within the software and services category, Laravel is positioned as an open-source project that serves as a foundation for web application development rather than as a commercial product suite. Its active solution areas include web application development, API development, and developer tooling for PHP teams, supported by first-party packages for testing, deployment, and cloud-based hosting.
Our description of Laravel. Updated October 2026.