This article presents a vivid comparison of two of the most popular PHP frameworks so that you can know which one to choose for your upcoming web project.
Confusing between two prevailing web application frameworks is common. With most frameworks evolving with time and in neck-to-neck competition, it’s really challenging to choose the apt one for your specific website or application development. Perhaps this article post will help. It has picked the two presently trending are also preferred by the web artisans globally. They are CakePHP and Laravel. It presents a precise comparative study of the two that will surely help you to get out of the dilemma.
Year of foundation
CakePHP was incepted long ago in 2005 while Laravel came to PHP market much later in 2011.
Current version
Despite being founded long years back, CakePHP is still running in lower version 3.x while Laravel is upgraded to 5.x. Thus, CakePHP has been unable to be run more updates and so is presumably lagging behind Laravel in many aspects.
Target base
CakePHP assists in the development of a wide array of web projects, including websites, web apps, cloud computing, governmental portal, big enterprise applications and so forth.
Laravel, on the other hand, only focuses on the web applications and websites of all sizes, scales and complexities.
Thus, it is expected that Laravel, being more specific in its target segment, have inherent, focussed functionalities that help in building high-end and performance oriented websites and web applications.

Ease of use
Laravel is pretty much easy to use compared to CakePHP. Hence, it is most times selected by the web developers projects of bigger scale. CakePHP being slightly complex needs more coding expertise and is chiefly used for smaller projects with intricate functionalities.
Moreover, Laravel has most recent web application frameworks need to build modern applications, i.e. object-oriented programming, whereas CakePHP is supported with document-oriented.
Functionalities
Laravel is clearly some step ahead from the CakePHP framework in terms of inbuilt functionalities. Starting from Symfony components, powerful template system, to event queuing. All these providers developers with more freedom to plan up their project structure as per their wish and develop it with lots of discretion.
Testing
Laravel allows for unit testing, where each component of the application is tested and validated. It ensures that the application runs flawlessly. This is not possible with CakePHP which supports either functional testing or UI validation.
Deciding between the two is subjective. It relies on the type of website or application you want to develop, its size or purpose. While if go with the popularity and ranking among the developers, Laravel is the one you should choose. However, CakePHP has some uniqueness and exclusive features which no other framework can provide owing to be its legacy in the PHP development domain. Thus, you need to choose wisely, depending on what kind of web solution you want to build for your business.
Johan Smith is an expert Laravel programmer in Sydney at GetAProgrammer, a renowned company for web development services with hands-on expertise in PHP including Laravel development in Australia and has been providing businesses with robust web solutions.