When speaking of web development within the PHP ecosystem, the mention of Laravel is unavoidable. Laravel is a full-fledged PHP framework that has gained prominence for building web applications, APIs, and enterprise applications. In this blog, we will explore Laravel stats, including market share, performance, and popularity, and provide you with the developer insight you need. Regardless, if you are a developer looking to choose a framework or a decision-maker for a tech stack, the numbers associated with Laravel are important.
We’ll explore how Laravel progressed over time, what the Laravel hosting performance story is, why so many developers continue to use it, and what the growth data points to in future forecasting. Along the way, we will also answer commonly asked questions, such as: How has the usage trend changed? How does Laravel market share compare? Why do developers still like it? And what do the growth stats indicate?
Table Of Content
Mapping Laravel Usage Over Time
Trend of Usage
Usage of Laravel has been increasing steadily. A recent study reported that Laravel “powers over 1.1 % of the entire internet, with a staggering 3.2 million websites using the framework.” Further, Laravel is in use by “more than 1.5 million websites around the globe,” with a growth of 15-20 % in annual downloads.
In the developer ecosystem, surveys suggest a sizable portion of PHP developers use Laravel. The “Laravel Trends 2024” survey also reported ~95.4 % of the survey respondents used Laravel for business applications. Overall, the trend results in increased usability, thanks to more websites, PHP developers, and clients using Laravel projects.
What the Numbers Tell Us
- Laravel is not just for small websites; teams are integrating it as a full framework for business applications, SaaS, and e-commerce systems.
- Several projects have been upgrading to the next version of Laravel (for example, Laravel 10, eventually Laravel 11. It demonstrates how the framework continues to evolve.
- Laravel has a stronger presence in the U.S., but is well spread across India, Brazil, and Southeast Asia. That being said, Laravel has a presence in virtually all of the world.
Laravel Performance
Now let’s talk about how Laravel performs, because although market share/ popularity is one thing, performance matters a lot when it comes to real-world applications.
What We Mean Here By Performance
When we talk about “Laravel performance,” it’s about request/ response speed, memory usage, scalability, and how well Laravel performs under larger/ complex loads. Performance also includes simplicity of use for modern PHP versions, architectures, and hosting.
Benchmarks & Observations
You can experience the trend of performance increasing with newer versions of PHP. The combination of the ecosystem of tools surrounding Laravel (e.g., caching, route optimizations, serverless options) contributes to increased performance for real applications.
Main Characteristics Supporting Performance
- Laravel is based on a modern approach to PHP 8+ features, significant improvements in language speed and performance.
- Machine learning support includes tools such as Laravel Octane (for high-performance execution), built-in and route caching, and a lightweight approach to interacting with the database using Eloquent ORM.
- The continued path to upgrades and support in the community means that Laravel provides performance improvement alongside continued development of PHP and web infrastructure.
Why Performance Matters for the Adoption of Laravel
Laravel performs well while maintaining developer productivity and feature sets, appealing to all teams that want speed and ease of use. This helps explain its growth in use.
When exploring Laravel performance, you see not just speed, but a combination of developer productivity, the maturity of the ecosystem, and the ability to perform efficiently. The benchmarks for performance demonstrate that Laravel is capable of performing for modern web applications while keeping up with the level of demand.
Laravel on the Rise: Metrics and Developer Analysis
Developer sentiment and popularity give you a different perspective: Why do developers keep on choosing Laravel?
Laravel Popularity Metrics
- GitHub Stars: Laravel’s repository has tens of thousands of stars, a clear indicator of growing interest in the open-source community.
- Downloads: Laravel has been downloaded millions of times from Packagist, a reliable indicator of its usage.
- Developer Surveys: Laravel is frequently listed as the most popular PHP framework in many surveys.
- Job Market: Laravel skills are in high demand, with many new job postings requiring Laravel experience, as well as entire projects built around the framework.
Reasons Developers Prefer Laravel
There are a few factors:
- Developer Experience: The expressive syntax, helpful abstractions (Eloquent ORM, Blade templating), and expansive ecosystem of Laravel make development feel better.
- Ecosystem and Community: There is a plethora of packages, tutorials, community forums, and in-person events (Laracon) that lend developers comfort in developing within Laravel.
- Documentation and Onboarding: If your team is onboarding onto the framework, being able to ramp up quickly and easily find materials and resources is a huge win.
- All-Around Versatility: As any small project can be done in Laravel, it lends itself to scaling up; it can be used for an MVP and quickly expanded when needed.
Support for modern architecture: Laravel supports the latest PHP versions and the latest serverless, microservices architecture, allowing it to stay relevant.
Insights from the Developer Community
For example, Reddit states:
“The most commonly discussed and used frameworks today by developers are, of course, Laravel. The reasons for Laravel popularity are many. The framework has grown rapidly in the market because of new additional layers of security, user-friendly, and fast.”
This kind of feedback supports that sentiment.
Laravel – Growth Rate and Future Outlook
The question is: what do the growth statistics say for the future of Laravel? What trends are impacting what happens next?
Growth Rate and Indicators
The number of Laravel downloads has been increasing by about 15-20% per year.
- Adoption Growth – One data set indicates that the number of websites using Laravel has “nearly doubled” between 2020 and 2024.
- Survey Indicator – In the 2023/2024 state of Laravel survey, 95.4% of respondents said they use Laravel for business applications (i.e., it’s clearly gaining traction in the enterprise).
- Market Projection – The broader PHP framework market is projected to see about a 9.5% CAGR until 2032.
Future Trends & Themes
Laravel is gradually optimizing itself for modern cloud environments. Developers are embracing containerization, edge deployment, and managed offerings to scale their Laravel applications without hassle. Laravel Vapor, Forge, and others are advancing the benefits of implementing cloud solutions.
The community is producing innovative packages, kits, and offerings that support full-stack development and use cases. Developers leverage testing tools, debugging tools, and SaaS-oriented starter kits that not only enhance quality but cut the overall development cycle.
With cool syntax, an accelerated development cycle, and immense community support, Laravel is making a presence across various industries. Organizations in the e-commerce, logistics, and healthcare fields have adopted or are considering Laravel for their web platforms and digital product offerings.
Recommendations
If you are a developer:
- Investing in learning Laravel remains a sound choice. The job market and community are positive.
- Place less emphasis on the framework itself and focus more on the ecosystem surrounding it (tooling, serverless patterns, architecture).
- Stay up to date with PHP version upgrades and Laravel’s version lifecycles. More performance and features are available in the newest versions.
If you are a tech lead or CTO selecting a stack for a project:
- Laravel has a strong development speed, performance, and a mature ecosystem – especially if your project is PHP-based.
- Do consider your use case: if you are building a large, high-traffic enterprise system, you’ll want to benchmark carefully (and Laravel performs well). Laravel’s ecosystem also offers many real-world examples of longevity.
- With a large community and many packages around Laravel, your risk of “framework stagnation” should be lower.
In a constantly changing environment, frameworks emerge and vanish, hype cycles continue, and the paradigm shift happens again. But the Laravel statistics demonstrate a framework that is not simply chasing hype; it’s part of many production systems, developers’ and organizations’ go-to framework, and constantly evolving in the PHP ecosystem.
Laravel market share, performance, and popularity demonstrate that it’s a reliable choice, stable, mature, and still growing. If you’re building web-based applications in PHP today and likely into the future, Laravel is absolutely a choice to take seriously.
FAQs
1. Why do Laravel developers still choose to use it despite other frameworks coming out?
Simply put, developers continue to prefer Laravel because it’s a practical balance between efficiency, community, and performance. Although new frameworks continue to come out, Laravel’s maturity, ecosystem, and track record mitigate risk. The size of the community means more packages, more help, and more trust. As new frameworks pop up, Laravel remains a solid and viable option.
2. What do the Laravel growth statistics tell us about future prospects?
The growth statistics tell us that there is no plateau in terms of usage, developer adoption, or overall ecosystem growth. The fact that there has been steady growth in downloads and overall adoption suggests Laravel will continue to be relevant and likely keep and/or grow its leadership position in PHP frameworks. This means organizations and developers investing in Laravel skills and infrastructure still make sense.
3. What is the market share of Laravel vs. other PHP frameworks?
Laravel has captured around 30-40% of the PHP framework market, based on the region-specific dynamics. It’s far ahead of many other PHP frameworks (Symfony, CodeIgniter) in adoption and usage. It has reached the point where it dominates a software development decision point for many developers and is the de facto PHP framework in many settings.
4. What trends do you see in Laravel usage over the last 1-2 years?
Laravel usage is trending strongly upward; more sites are adopting it, more developers prefer it, and industries and regions globally are using it. Its preference shifted from one of many PHP frameworks to the default PHP framework, many PHP projects, software development teams, and stacks. In many respects, positive data has emerged over time, e.g., new versions, record downloads, and surveys.
