Laravel PHP Framework vs. Magento Open Source

This framework's pros are more than cons. It can be used for many purposes; building e-commerce is one of them.

1. Code is clean and simple because of its routing.

2. Connection to database and query optimizing.

3. The amazing automatic memory to remember past queries is a big plus.

4. Migrations is the most crucial feature of this framework.

5. Supporting unit tests out of the box.

6. Artisan to use command line.

7. Large community to support your queries.

Incentivized

It's well suited for large eCommerce stores as it requires much effort to set up and the development cost for setting it up is high. It's less appropriate to use Magento where you are looking for quick development and launch of the store. Also, it is required to have a developer or sometimes the entire tech team to manage an e-commerce store, so you may need to hire a few PHP developers.

Incentivized

• Many libraries available which simplify integration of SaaS APIs within your application (eg, MailChimp, Mandrill, Stripe, Authorize.net)
• Pre-packaged tools to facilitate common tasks when building applications (eg, User Authentication and Authorization, Background Jobs, Queues, etc)
• Support for a broad set of technologies out of the box (eg, PostgreSQL, MySQL/MariaDB, MemcacheD, BeanstalkD, Redis, etc)

Incentivized

• Magento is perfect if our web design client likes a specific pre-made template and wants a fast solution.
• Magento allows us to customize its open-source code to create additional features and functionality.
• Magento saves small businesses time and money if they only need a simple solution.

Incentivized

• There isn't a whole lot to dislike about the framework, honestly. If I am forced to say something is that sometimes the authors change the directory layout and it's not always easy to deal with. That being said, I've never not been able to upgrade within a few hours.
• Sometimes using the artisan CLI - it requires additional tweaking to get it running on non-standard application rollouts.

Incentivized

• Magento 2 community is full of known and new bugs with long-pending pull requests and the community is on the hook for changes. Submit an very obvious issue to the github repo, and you will likely be met with a "this is open source and you use at your own risk." I counter this poor attitude with the fact that open source community has standards, and we do not label a "release" until those standards are met. Otherwise it's just a alpha, beta or numbered build. We don't release obviously bad software until it's fully working.
• Magento is expensive to maintain. You will need a well-paid php developer with apache and hosting knowledge, or you will have to hire an external firm. Either option will turn your website into an additional $100k/yr cost center, so you'd better be ready to ramp up sales. Every feature update or bugfix in the past year has uncovered more bugs, which my devs fix, but at the cost of timelines and billed hours way outside of my budget and target dates.

Incentivized

It's the dominant force in the SMB open source market. With the continued support of eBay/PayPal, Magento will continue to evolve and should be a market leader for some time.

Magento has a relly step learning curve. This means that you need to find experienced developers who can lead junior ones, otherwise the overall development process can be a disaster. However, once you are comfortable in developing on the platform, the customization capability are basically limitless and you can adapt the platform to any use case you can imagine. Also, there are many alredy developed marketplace modules that can solve, out of the box, many problems you may face.

Incentivized

Originally, it was a decision between Zend, CodeIgniter, and CakePHP for me. I chose CakePHP and used it as my main PHP framework for at least a couple of years before noticing and giving Laravel a fair try. Ultimately I selected Laravel because I felt it fit with my preferred development style, it utilized many of the modern best-practices I wanted to follow, and I felt that it allowed me to build better things in less time that seemed more maintainable. I have used, and still do use, Symfony directly for certain things, but I think of it (and use it) more as a code library than as a full application framework. When I'm building a web application, I tend to prefer Laravel.

Incentivized

Shopify is a closed ecosystem; the moment a client has a complex, custom workflow or needs to integrate with a legacy ERP system, Shopify’s app-based model falls short. WooCommerce just does not scale like Magento, and its architecture is not made for enterprise-scale e-commerce. SAP Commerce Cloud is a very close competitor, but it comes with licensing costs and sometimes can be overkill. It's, however, perfect if the customer already has something SAP in their ecosystem.

Incentivized

• Positive: Our delivery time for PHP application is faster than usual.
• Positive: Developers are happy and they write better code with their usual development tools. No tool-upgrade necessary.
• Negative: Initial delivery took 6 months extra and had to rewrite project several times.

Incentivized

• Better Total Cost of Ownership than bespoke e-commerce solutions due to being open source and the wide range of free/commercial extensions available to extend the platform.
• Often more extensive to set up and maintain than other open source alternatives, such as WooCommerce.