Laravel vs CakePHP (2025) — Which PHP Framework Is Best?

Laravel vs CakePHP in 2025 — Which PHP Framework Should You Pick?

TL;DR
Laravel excels when you need an opinionated, batteries-included toolkit with a massive ecosystem, real-time capabilities, and a huge talent pool. CakePHP shines for teams that value strict conventions, lightweight footprints, and rapid CRUD scaffolding out of the box. Your “best” choice boils down to project scope, team skill-set, and long-term maintainability.

1. Snapshot of the Current Landscape

Framework	Latest Stable (Jun 2025)	Minimum PHP	Release Cadence
Laravel	12.x (LTS) Laravel	8.2+	Major every 12 months
CakePHP	5.2.4 (minor patch on 5.2) Bakery	8.1+	Major every 18–24 months

2. Philosophy & Learning Curve

Laravel embraces a “developer-experience first” mantra. Fluent syntax, expressive facades, and extensive starter kits (React/Vue/Livewire) lower the on-boarding barrier, even for newcomers.
CakePHP takes the “Convention over configuration” route—more rigid folder structures and naming rules, which means less decision-fatigue but a steeper learning curve if you deviate from defaults.

When it matters: Rapid proof-of-concept? Laravel’s artisan commands and ecosystem make it feel friendlier. Long-term enterprise codebase with strict patterns? CakePHP’s conventions help keep teams aligned.

3. Core Architecture & Built-in Features

Capability	Laravel	CakePHP
ORM	Eloquent (ActiveRecord; dynamic relationships, attribute casting, polymorphic relations)	Cake ORM (DataMapper-like; strict entity hydration, behaviors such as Tree, Timestamp)
CLI	`artisan`—around 70 commands + starter-kit installers	`cake`—“Bake” for scaffolding, plus dozens of console helpers
Queues & Jobs	Native Redis/SQS/Beanstalk/RabbitMQ + Horizon dashboard Laravel	Queues via Queue plugin, but no first-party dashboard
Real-time / Broadcasting	Out-of-the-box event broadcasting (Laravel Reverb, Pusher, Ably) Laravel	Community WebSocket plugins; DIY for most apps
Testing	Pest + PHPUnit, Parallel testing, built-in model factories	PHPUnit + built-in TestSuite traits; fixtures-based tests
Official SaaS tooling	Forge, Vapor (serverless), Envoyer, Nova (admin), Spark (billing)	Few commercial tools; relies on generic CI/CD or Deployer

4. Ecosystem & Community

Package Universe: Packagist shows ~39 k Laravel-tagged packages vs ~9 k CakePHP-tagged ones (as of May 2025).
Learning Resources: Laravel News, Laracasts, official YouTube tutorials release weekly content, whereas CakePHP’s content cadence is slower but its Book documentation is famously concise.
Talent Pool: A LinkedIn job search routinely yields 8-10× more Laravel openings globally than CakePHP, beneficial if you need to scale hiring.

5. Performance & Scalability

Both frameworks run atop modern PHP 8+ JIT, so raw throughput differs by only single-digit percentages in most benchmarks. Real-world speed hinges on:

Caching Strategy — Laravel offers integrated route, view, and config caches (php artisan optimize), while CakePHP provides dedicated cache layers but leaves fine-tuning to you.
Database Access — Eloquent’s expressive syntax can tempt you into N+1 queries; Cake ORM’s explicit contain() syntax encourages pre-loading up front.
Asynchronous Queues — Horizon (Laravel) vs community Queue plugin (Cake) can tip the scale for job-heavy apps.

6. Development Experience

Scaffolding:
- Laravel: php artisan make:model Post -mcr scaffolds model, migration, controller, and resource in one go.
- CakePHP: bin/cake bake all Posts instantly generates fully-working MVC code and templates—arguably faster for CRUD admin panels.
Extensibility:
- Laravel’s service container + package auto-discovery make third-party integration trivial.
- CakePHP’s plugin system is modular but sometimes requires manual bootstrapping.

7. Use-Case Recommendations

Choose Laravel if…	Choose CakePHP if…
You need WebSockets, queues, scheduled tasks, notifications, and ready-made SaaS tooling in one stack.	You prefer strict MVC separation, lightweight code, and clean migrations without dozens of third-party dependencies.
Your team values huge community support, frequent updates, and abundant tutorials.	Your organisation has long-term CakePHP legacy apps or requires stringent conventions for junior developers.
Hiring PHP developers quickly is critical.	You’re building smaller, CRUD-centric back-office tools or APIs with less moving parts.

8. The Verdict

There is no absolute “best” framework—only the best fit:

Laravel is the Swiss-army knife: full-featured, popular, and fast to iterate, ideal for most green-field startups and SaaS products.
CakePHP is the disciplined craftsman’s kit: lean, highly structured, and wonderfully consistent for CRUD-heavy business apps where over-engineering is a risk.

Pro tip: Prototype a single user story in both. Gauge the speed of development, code readability, and team comfort. The hands-on feel will tell you more than any checklist.

9. Looking Ahead

Laravel 13 (expected Q1 2026) is rumored to ship a new modular kernel, while CakePHP 6 is exploring native async tasks and PSR-15 middleware parity. Keep an eye on both roadmaps before locking your stack.