Laravel Vs CodeIgniter: Which One To Choose?

Php is a leading web development technology used by many software companies over the years. And it has become essential to use a PHP MVC framework for developing custom solutions with PHP programming language. There are multiple type of PHP MVC frameworks available and among those, Laravel and CodeIgniter are the most popular. Here we will compare Laravel vs CodeIgniter, to choose the best one. Let us see one by one in detail.

What Is Laravel?

It is an open-sourced widely used PHP framework and dedicated to the web apps development by using MVC architectural patterns. This framework reuses the existing functionality of the core framework along with its own features. As laravel is released under MIT license, its source code is hosted on GitHub. Developers consider it as a reliable framework due to its accurate and expressive language rule. Know Laravel Packages To Improve Productivity at- Top 11 Laravel Packages To Improve Productivity.

Features Of Laravel-

• Easy integration with third-party libraries 
• Provides better IO capabilities
• Easy to use blade templating engine
• Inbuilt authentication mechanism
• Built-in caching mechanism
• Modular Packaging
• Unmatched quality session control
• Dependency manager fully composer based
• Query builder acts as potential ORM alternative

Why Should You Use Laravel?

• Has a great documentation feature
• Laravel framework has a auto-loading feature which loads itself and hence there is no need for human intervention.
• It offers the version control system that helps with the simplified management of migrations.
• Supports DBMS platforms like SQL Server, Postgre SQL and My SQL.
• This framework can generate a lot of new tools by the help of a LOC container.
• Framework allows you to enforce the constraints between various DBM objects in an advanced query builder mechanism
• It also supports Artisan command with the sample codes line interface.
• It has modular packaging with composer-based dependency manager
• Laravel supports Eloquent ORM to work on DB.

What Is CodeIgniter?

CodeIgniter is a PHP framework designed for developers who likes and prefer simple and elegant toolkit to developed featured web apps. It is one of the best framework for developing dynamic websites using PHP. Main reason for the popularity of CodeIgniter is- it allows the third-party plugins to implement complicated functionalities.  This  framework is great at security and encryption procedures.

Features Of CodeIgniter-

• It is a lightweight and easy to use MVC framework 
• Supports Paging and data encryption
• It offers template Engine Class, Unit Testing Class and calendar Class
• Search-engine Friendly URLs
• Offers form and data validation and data encryption
• This framework supports for Class extensions and Hooks
• Security and XSS Filtering
• Error Logging
• inbuilt class support for sending a mail
• Image Manipulation Library
• Offers session management
• Provides classes for email sending, gives support for the Attachments, HTML/Text emails, multiple protocols like SMTP, POP and more

Why Should You Use CodeIgniter?

• This framework is well structured and cleared,  also the documentation is easy and hence development becomes easy.
• It offers better stability and support
• Allows caching of the website for better performance and easy loading times. 
• Routing method is easy and simple
• It has a wide knowledgeable community support that can solve framework issues.

Key Differences Between Laravel And CodeIgniter-

• Laravel provides a agnostic migrations feature and hence it becomes easy to simplify database schema migration. Developers can easily modify and share the database schemas of app without need of complex code. Also you can develop database schemas of the application by combining database agnostic migration with schema builder. But CodeIgniter does not provide any feature to simplify database schema migration.
• Laravel provides inbuilt support for the robust template engine Blade. It allows PHP developers to optimize the performance of sites by increasing and manipulating multiple views. Conversely, CodeIgniter doesn’t provide a built-in template engine. Developers need to integrate the framework with robust template engines such as Smarty to do general tasks and improve the performance of web apps.
• In Laravel, RESTful Controllers allows developers to build REST APIs without extra efforts and time. You can set the $restful property as true in the RESTful Controller to build custom REST APIs without writing extra code. Whereas, CodeIgniter do not provide features to simplify the development of REST APIs. 
• CodeIgniter supports more database as compared to Laravel. CodeIgniter supports ORACLE, oriented, IBM DB2, Microsoft SQL Server and JDBC compatible. Here is a list of databases supported by CodeIgniter and Laravel both- MySQL, Microsoft Bi, PostgreSQL and MongoDB.
• CodeIgniter doesn’t support ORM whereas Laravel allows developer to exploit Eloquent object-relational mapping ORM. One can use the ORM framework to work with multiple databases more proficiently by Active Record implementation. Eloquent Object Relational Mapping allows you to interact with databases through the specific model of individual database tables. Developer can use the model to achieve general tasks such as insert new records and run database queries.
• CodeIgniter needs developer to create and maintain modules with Modular extension. Laravel has built-in modularity features due to which developers can divide a large project into small modules and later on reuse these modules across multiple projects.

Final Words-

Laravel and Codeigniter, both frameworks have immense effect  in web development. Each one is unique with their own features. Choosing the appropriate one between two depends on the type of project and client requirements.