PHP has a reputational problem that is largely deserved by a very large body of badly written PHP and almost entirely undeserved by the language as it exists today. PHP 8.3 is fast, properly typed and well tooled, and Laravel is one of the most productive application frameworks available in any language.
We build a substantial share of our business systems in Laravel or CodeIgniter 4, and this is the reasoning — including where we would choose something else.
The argument nobody makes honestly
Technology selection in Indian mid-market IT is frequently driven by what sounds impressive in a proposal rather than by what the client can maintain. A vendor recommends a stack that requires skills the client does not have and cannot easily hire, delivers it, and leaves. Eighteen months later the system is frozen because nobody in the building can safely change it.
The single most important selection criterion for a business system is not performance or elegance. It is whether the organisation can maintain and extend it in three years, either in-house or by hiring another vendor without a rewrite.
In eastern India, that criterion frequently points at PHP. There is a deep local pool of capable PHP developers, a large installed base, and a hiring market where replacing a Laravel developer is straightforward.
When PHP is the correct answer
When the client already has PHP engineers maintaining an estate. Adding a second discipline means hiring for two skill sets, supporting two toolchains and coordinating two upgrade cycles, and mid-market organisations rarely have the capacity for that.
When the application is CRUD-heavy line-of-business software — which describes most ERP, CRM, HRMS and portal work. Laravel reaches a working, testable application faster than most alternatives for exactly this shape of problem.
When it must run on-premise with minimal operational tooling. A PHP application runs on a plain server inside a plant network without a container platform, a service mesh or a platform engineer. That matters more than it sounds when the deployment target is a machine in a factory office.
In practice
Laravel or CodeIgniter 4
Laravel is our default for new PHP work. The queue system, scheduler, migrations, validation, authorisation policies and testing tooling cover most of what a business application needs without assembling libraries. The ecosystem is large and the documentation is genuinely good.
CodeIgniter 4 is a deliberate choice in two situations: when the client's team is already fluent in it, and when a lighter framework suits a focused application without Laravel's conceptual surface. Modern CI4 is a considerably better framework than its reputation from the version 2 era suggests — proper namespacing, dependency injection, migrations and a decent testing story.
What we do not do is migrate a healthy CodeIgniter application to Laravel for its own sake. If the application is well structured, on a supported version, and the team is productive, the migration cost buys very little.
| Situation | Choose | Why |
|---|---|---|
| New build, no existing PHP estate | Laravel | Richest tooling, largest ecosystem, best hiring pool |
| Team fluent in CodeIgniter | CodeIgniter 4 | Ownership stays with the team; CI4 is capable |
| Stuck on CodeIgniter 3, no upgrade path | Migrate to CI4 or Laravel | Unsupported version is a security exposure |
| Heavy queue, scheduling, event needs | Laravel | These are first-class rather than assembled |
| Very focused single-purpose app | CodeIgniter 4 | Less framework to reason about |
How we structure a PHP application that lasts
The failure mode of large PHP applications is business logic distributed across controllers, models and a handful of helper files nobody can name. We keep controllers thin — validate, delegate, respond — and put domain logic into service and action classes testable without an HTTP request.
Form requests handle validation. Policies handle authorisation. Events decouple side effects. Anything slow goes onto a queue with a supervised worker, because a queue worker that dies silently causes emails and integrations to stop with no error anywhere.
Migrations and seeders live in version control and are applied identically in every environment. Static analysis runs in CI. Feature tests cover the money-handling paths. None of this is exotic — it is simply applied consistently, which is what most inherited PHP estates lack.
The N+1 tax
Eloquent makes N+1 queries trivially easy to introduce and they are the most common cause of slow Laravel pages. Log queries in development, eager-load by default, and treat a page issuing four hundred queries as a bug rather than a characteristic.
Modernising a legacy estate
Most of our PHP work begins with an existing application: an ageing CodeIgniter 3 or bespoke system that works, that the business depends on, and that nobody wants to touch.
We modernise with the strangler pattern rather than a rewrite. New functionality is built in the modern framework alongside the old application, routes migrate module by module, and the two share a session and a database until the last route moves. The business keeps running throughout, each step is reversible, and there is no eighteen-month rewrite arriving obsolete.
The first-phase item on nearly every takeover is upgrading PHP itself. Running 7.x in production is unsupported, slower and a genuine security exposure, and the upgrade is usually less work than teams fear.
What we would not build in PHP
Sustained CPU-bound numerical work — large data transformations, model training, heavy image processing at volume. That belongs in Python or on the data platform, and we identify it during architecture rather than after a load test fails.
Real-time systems requiring long-lived stateful connections at high concurrency. Node or Go handles that shape better.
And anything where the client explicitly wants a single language across web, mobile and API for team reasons. That is a legitimate organisational preference and TypeScript across the stack serves it well.
Key takeaways
- Maintainability by the client in three years outranks elegance as a selection criterion.
- Laravel for new PHP work; CodeIgniter 4 where the team is fluent or the app is focused.
- Thin controllers, service classes, policies, supervised queue workers and tests on money paths.
- Modernise legacy estates with the strangler pattern, never a big-bang rewrite.
- Move CPU-bound and high-concurrency real-time work out of PHP deliberately.
Frequently asked
For line-of-business applications, yes. PHP 8.3 is fast and properly typed, and Laravel is among the most productive application frameworks in any language. What matters far more than the language is whether the code is structured, tested and maintainable — we have seen excellent PHP systems and appalling ones in every other language.
Only with a reason. If your CI application is well structured, on a supported version, and your team is productive, migration buys little. Migrate when you are stuck on CodeIgniter 3 with no upgrade path, when you need capabilities the framework lacks, or when hiring has become difficult. When we do migrate, it is incremental with both running side by side.
Yes — several ERP systems we built and still support are Laravel applications running multi-plant manufacturing with hundreds of users. The constraints that matter at that scale are data modelling, query discipline, queue architecture and caching strategy, none of which are framework-specific.
Yes, and it is a common and sensible arrangement — Laravel as a typed API and job runner, React or Next.js as the interface. It lets a PHP team keep ownership of business logic while the front end gets modern tooling and performance.