Rails, Laravel... What to choose?

I've never used Laravel, though I did a fair amount of PHP in the past. I've been writing Ruby and working on Rails applications for about a decade now, plus plenty of JavaScript (including React SPAs).

My take: the Ruby language is way more fun than the PHP language, and Rails 7 is in a healthy place as a framework. I will say that the wider Ruby ecosystem is a bit less - busy? - than it was 10 years ago, but the biggest tools are still well maintained.

to answer your specific question: both of the projects I've recently started are Rails 7 and hosted on render.com.

Both frameworks are excellent, and deserve their fans. The typical best answer is to use what you know.

If you don't know, I recommend Rails. Laravel has a lot more marketing push behind it, because there's a lot of stuff that you can buy. Rails isn't a product, and the tools which inspired the Laravel equivalents are all OSS.

That said, both frameworks deserve you spending an hour to follow a basic tutorial to set up a boilerplate app so you can see what's what.

You asked in another threat what makes Rails (and Ruby) more fun. There's a long but excellent answer here.

I've used both for a good couple of years, and I actually love them both.

My personal take would be that Laravel probably has a better developer experience —their docs are really good, and packages that are considered part of the "core" Laravel ecosystem have matured and evolved really well.

I think Laravel's ORM (Eloquent) is way better than ActiveRecord, and emails and notifications are more optimized/iterated.

Rails has Ruby, which I like a lot more than PHP.
The community has been struggling quite a bit since the whole Basecamp thing, a significant amount of package maintainers stopped contributing, and a lot of people are concerned about its future, but I honestly believe the community won't let Rails die.

So both of them are actually really good! But as many others have said, if you want speed, you should be using something you're already familiar with.

If not, both of these would be a great pick IMO!

I wanted to build a startup nearly 2 years ago and I thought then the react, express route was the best route to take....oh was I wrong! If you have money or a team of dev yes go that route but for me Rails is king!!

In my humble opinion myself and one other dev have build a fully fledged application with bookings, messaging features just like WhatsApp, and more so much quicker in rails it's unbelievable, I've read a few comments saying no you have to do it this way in rails and I love that, if a dev leaves you there's a WAY to do things in rails and another dev can easily see what is happening in the application.

Laravel was another option but for me it isn't as time tested as rails, major companies launched and still use rails, rails has been through the battlefield and is still strong with updates getting better and better, with react, express option you decide what you do and there are numerous ways of achieving your goal which can be great for a team of devs but for a small team or solo dev you can't beat rails, the one downside is learning rails there are limited resources, but I see more and more channels starting up adding tuts for rails due to the version 7 updates.

The js ecosystem changes way to much, to many new shiny frameworks that are the new best way of doing things, this is great and all but if you want to launch an app in the quickest way possible and have all you need from frontend to backend and a WAY of doing things that have been used by major applications.....it rails!!

Laravel was inspired by Rails, from what I've heard.
If you opt for SQL, Rails won the hearts with ActiveRecord, a layer that makes working with SQL Dbs much friendlier.
If Rails is too much, there is a tiny, flexible Ruby framework called Sinatra, which looks like ExpressJS, a middleware, and a front, but you can connect a Db via ActiveRecord.
Ruby may be more fun but also is a more sophisticated lang whereas PHP is less "magical" as it evolved over the years into a full-featured lang from humble beginnings, pretty much as JavaScript did.

I have tried a lot of frameworks. If were talking about building a web app with authentication, I can move the fastest with Laravel and its Breeze package.

According to TotalJobs

Ruby developer ~salary: £72,500
PHP developer ~salary: £47,500

If you plan to do part-time freelancing on-the-side to maintain financial stability early-phase, according to this data I recommend Ruby.

Although, I use Laravel a lot (never used Ruby) and I like it a lot.

I use Laravel, I occassionally use NextJS for relatively straight forward things, but anything that I slightly complex in terms of backend I have the API routes it a little bit of hassle especially around dynamic/optional parameters.

For the backend on most projects, I use Laravel. Really like it and definetly makes coding stuff quicker - I don't use the frontend side of as I use ReactJS for the frontend so only use Laravel as the API.

The built in database models (Eloquent) is a breeze and makes things super simple. If you go down the Laravel path, I'd recommend using Laravel IDE Helper (https://github.com/barryvdh/laravel-ide-helper) as it provides Intellisense to the Laravel methods and your own database models so you don't need to keep trying to remember the database field names.

I've got no experience on Ruby so can't comment there.

Django + HTMX all the way! Such a breath of fresh air to write code ~exclusively in Python / HTML and still have modern feeling apps.

I can definitely understand why u are considering using Ruby on Rails or Laravel for ur backend development projects. Both frameworks have proven themselves to be great choices for building web applications, especially for solo developers and indie hackers who are looking for simplicity and efficiency.

Personally, I have had a lot of success using Ruby on Rails. One of the biggest advantages of Rails is its convention over configuration approach, which allows developers to quickly set up basic SaaS projects like login and payment systems with minimal setup. Additionally, Rails has a large and active community, which means there are a lot of resources available for learning and troubleshooting, and a wide range of gems and libraries that can be used to add functionality to your application.

As an example, I launched my startup called Myrecipes in a very short time using Ruby on Rails. Myrecipes is a meal planning and grocery delivery service for busy families and individuals that allows users to create, plan and order their own meals through a website and mobile app. I was able to quickly set up basic features such as user authentication, meal planning, and ordering using Rails and it helped me to focus more on the business logic rather than spending more time on basic features.

Overall, I believe that Ruby on Rails is a great choice for anyone looking to quickly set up basic SaaS projects and I highly recommend it for u and other indie hackers who are considering it.

Thank you for all your answer, this topic was very interesting!

As expected, a lot of people suggested different things, and on this kind of subject, no consensus can be found (and that's quite normal!).

I think that with all this information, it will be difficult to make a just theoretical choice.
So I give myself as a small challenge for a few weeks to create a simple application with Laravel, RoR, Remix, AdonisJS.

I will try to see the advantages and disadvantages of each one and make my own idea about the technology that seems to be the most adapted to my philosophy.

Have you considered NestJS?

I'm going to other way these days. After building a lot of products with Rails and Elixir Phoenix (which are both great choices), i'm building the next one with Typescript and BlitzJS. At the end of the day so much time goes into the UI/UX that i feel it would be more productive to use a single language with shared typing. So far its going great.

Blitz is going through a rework right now so many not be perfect fit but you should look at RedwoodJS and NextJs+tRPC for instance.

If want to completely abandon JS frontends and want to do quick RoR SaaS projects, do take a look at BulletTrain for a fee you get a lot of this out of the box.

Even if Ruby On Rails is faster and more efficient than all the PHP frameworks then the difference can be only very small, and that small difference should not matter if you want to start building basic SaaS unless you are starting a company as big as Facebook or Google.

I have never used Ruby on Rails before, but it is certain that PHP and Laravel are much more popular. Therefore there are more free resources, libraries, supported APIs and tutorials, and that's what makes PHP/Laravel cheaper. Also many other free web software such Wordpress, Drupal, Magento use PHP, so if you are focused on web applications and SaaS then PHP is a better choice.

The biggest downside of Laravel is that it has its own problems with framework design: it uses controversial design patterns such Active Pattern which breaks the single responsibility rule and makes unit tests almost impossible or Facades that make your dependencies global in the entire app. Actually Facades are not a problem at all because it's optional, and you can use dependency injection instead, but it still encourages beginners bad habits. However if you aim at development speed and low costs then these things should not be issues for you. If you really value quality of code and testing then you should pick Symfony.

Which language are you most familiar with? It sounds like you're good with JS. In that case, https://remix.run/ may fit you.

It's Rails for me. And I am building a custom kit to ship even faster. It's kind of strange that JS eco-system doesn't have a good competition, but no problem for me. I don't like node_modules :).

I used to use Laravel and ReactJS/Vue for the frontend and connect using IntertiaJS it served me well but the context switching between JavaScript and PHP was making it difficult for me.

So I switched to AdonisJS (Adonis is inspired by Laravel) and it made things easier because now both ends are JavaScript and I still get to enjoy the Laravel vibe with Node.

However, I would not recommend learning a new framework/tech stack to build the MVP it does not matter to end-users how your product is built, use whatever you are most familiar and comfortable with.

I am with Laravel and I think it does its job pretty good.

Bottomline: Use whatever you know better.

My advice is to stay away from frameworks. I can’t tell you how many years I’ve wasted learning them. Zend Framework when I did PHP, Flask when I did Python. The list goes on.

But if you insist on one then you already have some JavaScript experience, you could either continue to use it but use Node.js with a lightweight framework like express.

I would consider Go a serious contender. You can achieve a lot without ever touching any third party frameworks because the standard library comes with a built in HTTP server, templating language and so much more.

Either way, I recommend picking an SQL-based database like SQLite for small projects or PostgreSQL if you need some scale or more complex queries. My reasoning is simple… you’ll keep this knowledge until the day you drop (which could be ten years before your time if you suffer the stress of learning half a dozen frameworks over a few years). If you focus your efforts on SQL you’ll save yourself pages of unnecessary code. One good query will avoid the need to process a ton of results in code. Since most of your learning and efforts for coding will be based on solving algorithmic problems and not just worn away learning all the idiosyncrasies [of a framework], you’ll become a better developer and be able to apply this knowledge anywhere you find yourself in future.