+44 141 628 8980
(786) 269-2247
+61 872007153
+91 8900027268 (Sales only)
Are you torn between CodeIgniter and Laravel, two leading PHP frameworks for web development, and getting confused about selecting the suitable one? There’s no need to worry! In this blog, we’ll make a head-to-head discussion on these two to determine the ultimate champion! Get ready and take a detailed look at these two before you hire a Laravel development company or want to choose CodeIgniter.
Table of Content
- Laravel Definition & Features
- Codeigniter Definition & Features
- A Detailed Comparative Study on Laravel and CodeIgNiter
- What Should be Your Choice?
- How to Hire a Laravel Developer?
- Final Words
Laravel Definition & Main Features
Laravel is a highly demandable open-source PHP framework available on GitHub, the brainchild of Taylor Otwell. Getting inspiration from Symfony, (another renowned PHP framework), Otwell ingeniously designed Laravel on the foundation of popular Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture- an architecture that promotes a structured, organized, and efficient approach to web development.
Industry leaders who use Laravel are BBC, Invoice Ninja, About You, 9 GAG, Alpha coders, etc.
Features of Laravel
Laravel became immensely popular among business owners for its unique features. Take look.
Artisan Tool: Artisan tool, a command-line interface in Laravel enables developers to automate repetitive tasks. Project creation, arranging migrations, function testing, and building custom commands can be done using Artisan, saving developers’ effort and time.
Artisan offers commands to generate boilerplate code, including controllers, models, migrations, and more which decreases the development time. Business owners benefit from faster development cycles and reduced time to market for their products or services.
Eloquent ORM: Eloquent ORM (Object-Relational Mapping) makes database interactions easier. By utilizing Eloquent, developers can create, modify, and delete database records using PHP syntax instead of writing complex SQL queries.
Simplified database operations assure business owners to focus on their core operations. Intuitive syntax and powerful features of Eloquent reduce development time, improve data management, and enhance scalability, resulting in efficient business processes and better customer experiences.
MVC Architectural Pattern: Based on the Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture, Laravel enables logical project organization. This separation of components assures developers don’t face any difficulty in managing different aspects of web applications.
The view represents the user interface, the controller handles user actions, and the model deals with the data.
It’s a worthy asset for building large, complex web applications, offering systematic code organization, improved performance, and enhanced documentation.
It enables developers to effectively separate concerns, leading to efficient development and easier maintenance.
Community Support: Laravel boasts a thriving global community of passionate skilled dedicated developers popular as “web artisans.” The community gives access to several useful resources, including Laracasts (screencasts) hosted by Laravel.
These platforms provide much-needed support, tutorials, and discussions, ensuring developers can quickly overcome challenges related to Laravel development and upgrade their skills. So, developers of a reliable Laravel development company can fix any issue with ease without creating alarming concerns for business owners.
Handles Increased Web Traffic Successfully
Any web application should offer seamless scalability and responsiveness to increased user demands. The robust queue mechanism in Laravel addresses this challenge and enables business owners to handle high web traffic without compromising server stability.
By deferring time-intensive tasks and prioritizing critical operations, it ensures reliable performance even during peak traffic, delivering exceptional user experience and business growth.
CodeIgniter Definition & Top Features
CodeIgniter, another lightweight PHP framework, lessen the hassles of developers by reducing the need for repetitive coding while delivering optimal performance. EllisLab launched CodeIgniter in 2006, and currently, BCIT has taken the responsibility of maintaining it.
The simplicity of this framework makes it an appealing choice for building web applications, and CodeIgniter is considered the market leader among PHP frameworks.
Some of the most demandable names counted on CodeIgniter are Buffer, Nissan, NetSuite INC, etc.
Top Features of CodeIgniter
Cost-effective- As a free and open-source framework, CodeIgniter allows businesses to utilize it without any licensing costs. It provides an affordable and effective solution for web development needs.
Easy configuration- CodeIgniter’s MVC-based architecture offers a straightforward and transparent configuration process. With simple installation steps, developers can quickly set up the framework and start working on their projects which helps in saving time for business owners.
Offers Unhindered Security- Security is paramount in CodeIgniter. Built-in features for input/output filtering and encryption ensure top security and it provides robust functionality to protect web applications from potential cyber threats.
SEO-Friendly Features- CodeIgniter has the features that aid in search engine optimization, such as SEO-friendly URLs. By utilizing these features, businesses can enhance and strengthen their website’s visibility and search engine ranking that boost their online presence and revenues.
A Detailed Comparative Study on Laravel and CodeIgniter
Performance
CodeIgniter 4 with PHP 4 and 5 needs low server requirements and easy validation that simplify the programmer’s job. It gives freedom to explore functions and swift installation for the developers Also, Laravel excels in scalability with features like Artisan, HTTP support, Eloquent ORM, and MVC, enabling efficient management of larger tasks.
Scalability
CodeIgniter is known for its remarkable scalability due to its lightweight nature and lack of conventions. This feature allows easy modifications without sacrificing performance. The extensibility of CodeIgniter is achieved through the ability to extend helpers, libraries, and controllers, making it adaptable to specific needs.
Laravel also offers extensibility by allowing modifications and additions to its core components. With features like HAProxy load balancing, token-based authentication, and advanced caching techniques, Laravel gives the top scalability for large-scale applications.
So, both CodeIgniter and Laravel come with solid extensibility and scalability options and are considered suitable choices for expanding applications and accommodating increased traffic and performance needs.
Flexibility
Despite adopting the same MVC framework, both follow different approaches to its implementation. CodeIgniter ensures flexibility by making the model and views optional, prioritizing a tidy and efficient development process.
It provides freedom to developers, allowing them to deviate from strict MVC guidelines. Also, it has built-in components that facilitate data separation and independent management of emails, databases, and sessions.
Laravel strictly sticks to the MVC architecture and maintains the structure consistently throughout the development process. It needs to create models for database interactions and controllers to handle data flow, which is then presented in view files. This approach ensures a well-maintained MVC structure, but at the same time, it may pose a challenge for those unfamiliar with MVC principles.
So, CodeIgniter is more flexible in deviating from MVC and offers simplified development. But a Laravel development company needs to follow the MVC guidelines, promoting a standardized and structured approach.
Error Handling Capacities
Error handling denotes the recovering process of a program from an error and continuing the normal functions. The main aim of error handling is error anticipation, detection, fixing applications, programming, or any communication errors.
Error handling plays a significant role in software applications. Both CodeIgniter and Laravel have different types of error-handling mechanisms.
CodeIgniter comes with a straightforward error-handling system. In development and testing environments, it displays all errors, while in production, it hides them. However, it’s a modifiable behavior, and you can do it by adjusting the environment settings in the .env file.
CodeIgniter generates an error, debug, and informational messages and allows you to save errors as text files.
Laravel has a comprehensive built-in error-handling system that can automatically detect, log, and notifies you about errors and exceptions. You can find these error logs in the App\Exceptions\Handler class, which contains methods for reporting and rendering errors.
Comparatively, CodeIgniter comes with a simpler error-handling system with customizable display behavior, and Laravel provides a more robust system that automatically captures and reports errors offering efficient debugging and resolution.
Approach to Template Designs
In terms of template designs, both these frameworks follow different approaches. Template Parser Class, a basic template engine in CodeIgniter allows you to work with HTML and CSS files. Additionally, it supports integration with third-party template engines like Smarty or Twig. CodeIgniter offers an API Response trait to simplify common response types in controllers.
The blade is the template engine in Laravel that offers a simple yet powerful syntax structure resembling standard HTML files. When it comes to APIs, Laravel provides an easy solution for authentication using random tokens assigned to users.
The config/auth.php configuration file specifies an API guard with a token driver. Moreover, Laravel’s resourceful controllers simplify the creation of RESTful APIs, allowing for convenient routing in routes/API.
CodeIgniter offers better flexibility in template engine choices, while Laravel utilizes Blade for its coherent and straightforward syntax. Both frameworks focus on utilizing APIs, with CodeIgniter providing a handy API Response trait and Laravel offering API authentication and resourceful controllers.
In-Built Functionality
CodeIgniter lacks built-in modular functionality, making it challenging to divide projects into separate working parts. However, you can create modules using modular extensions.
But a Laravel development company can use the built-in module features that divide big-scale projects into smaller, manageable modules. This modular approach comes with an organized folder structure, preventing overlap between specific features of different modules. Default packages in Laravel that quicken development are Cashier, Passport, Scout, Envoy, socialite, etc.
So, Laravel excels in built-in modular functionality and offers added packages that streamline development processes. But CodeIgniter needs modular extensions to achieve modularity.
Popularity
CodeIgniter is the second most popular PHP framework after Laravel that has 18.2k stars on GitHub. Despite being less popular than Laravel, CodeIgniter is still a favorite framework for many business owners.
Known for its stability and capability to handle several complex systems, Laravel enjoys significant popularity and has garnered 71.2k on GitHub. The widespread tendency of hiring a Laravel development company is evident, and with time this tendency will increase.
Comparison at a Glance
| CodeIgniter | Laravel | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Created | 2006 | 2011 | |
| Architecture | MVC | MVC Strict | |
| Open Sourced | Open Source Framework | Open Source Framework | |
| Extensible | Supports Extensibility | Supports Extensibility | |
| Scalability | Scalable Framework | Highly scalable Framework | |
| GitHub Starts | 18.2k | 69.5k | |
| Built-In Modules | Absent | Comes with built-in modules | |
| Template Engine | PHP proprietary | Blade Template Engine | |
| Database Support | MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite3 | MariaDB, MYSQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite3, SQL Server | |
What Should be Your Choice?
After going through this detailed comparison probably now you got a notion about these two PHP frameworks. So, whether should you hire a Laravel development company or CodeIgniter will meet your need? Check the following lines and know the right scenario to choose them.
Choose Laravel in these scenarios:
Handling huge and complex web development projects
Chose Laravel if your website needs numerical analysis frequently
Laravel is a good option to build secured website development
Hire a Laravel development company if you need quicker development
CodeIgniter might be an ideal option if you need:
Better results using minimal codes
If your project needs a simple and error-free configuration
Faster and flawless completion of your web development project
How to Hire a Laravel Developer?
However, if your project needs help from Laravel developers, it is essential to find the best developers. And Hiring a Laravel developer with a proper skillset requires careful consideration to ensure you find the right fit for your project. Here are the tips that will make hiring easier.
Assess the Expertise
Find developers with a strong understanding of Laravel’s features, such as routing, ORM (Eloquent), migrations, and Blade templating engine. Also, evaluate their knowledge of Laravel’s ecosystem, including popular packages like Laravel Scout, Passport, and Horizon.
Review Earlier Laravel Projects
Go through the previously completed projects to get a notion about their work quality. Check if your chosen developer has experience in building scalable applications, handling database interactions, and implementing RESTful APIs.
Consider Laravel-specific tools and practices
Make sure to check their familiarity with Laravel development tools like Composer for package management and Laravel Forge for server deployment. Also, discuss their knowledge of Laravel best practices, including code optimization, caching, security measures, and performance optimization.
Evaluate problem-solving skills:
Be sure to ask Laravel-specific problem-solving questions to assess their ability to troubleshoot and find efficient solutions within the framework. Discuss their approach to handling common Laravel challenges like authentication, authorization, and handling complex business logic. And make sure to find one who comes with updated knowledge.
Communication Skills Matter
Evaluate their communication skills and their ability to understand and effectively communicate technical concepts related to Laravel. Assess their teamwork and collaboration skills as Laravel development often involves working in a team environment.
Go after these steps and hire a dedicated Laravel developer who comes with the necessary technical skills and has a deep understanding of Laravel’s ecosystem and best practices, ensuring the success of your Laravel project.
Final Words
CodeIgniter and Laravel have gained popularity among programmers worldwide for their unique features and utility. While both frameworks have different pros and cons, the selection should be based on your users’ needs and the requirements of your development process. So, choose the framework that best aligns with your project’s specific needs and scalability. And for the most effective solutions, choose the developers from a trusted Laravel development company without thinking.
