Laravel Vs CodeIgniter: Which framework to choose?

Do you know what’s the one thing common among top-rated software solutions like Laravel Forge, Invoice Ninja, A2 Hosting, Buffer, and Freelancer.com? They are equal in one aspect that is they leverage excellent competencies of the top PHP frameworks Laravel and CodeIgniter. 

However, both of these technologies are excellent, you many of us often wonder whether to choose Laravel or CodeIgniter for a dream project. But, your dilemma ends here! Yes, you’ve heard that right! This blog will navigate you through an all-encompassing analysis of the top PHP frameworks Laravel vs Codeigniter, easing your tech selection for your next project. 

Let’s read between the lines! 

What is Laravel?

Laravel is an open-source, and easy-to-use PHP framework to build PHP-based websites and web apps. Based on model-view-controller architecture, it provides elegant syntax and features such as routing, caching, and authentication. These help simplify URL management, boost the app’s speed, and provide ready-to-use and secure user login along with access control features, saving time with ensured efficiency. 

What’s more, Laravel offers tools, for instance, Blade for templating, strengthened support for RESTful APIs, and Eloquent ORM for database management, easing complex tasks like scheduling, queue handling, and email integration. Apps developed with Laravel tend to be highly scalable with an easily maintainable codebase. 

Uses Statistics of Laravel

As per a survey by BuiltWith, there are 1,235,487 websites out there that are currently powered by Laravel. Besides, 1,282,195 sites use Laravel hysterically, and 30,205 websites in India currently use Laravel. 

Key Features of Laravel

Have a look at the key features of Laravel: 

• MVC Architecture: Following the MVC (Model View Controller) pattern, Laravel separates the logic among Model, View, and Controller, making code clean and maintainable.  

• Blade Templating Engine: The Blade Templating Engine in Laravel provides a creative and concise way to build application views. What’s more, they are easy to read, maintain, and promote clean code creation.    

• Eloquent ORM: Laravel provides a reliable Object Relational Mapping (ORM), that makes database interactions effortless, allowing you to interact with databases using PHP syntax.    

• Artisan CLI: Artisan CLI (Command Line Interface) in Laravel automates repetitive tasks such as Laravel database migrations, code generation, and the like. It allows developers to synchronize the database schema along with maintaining seeding databases in Laravel for testing.    

• Built-In Features: Laravel offers a wide range of built-in features that support Lavavel authentication, authorization, and caching, providing a seamless development experience.   

• Dependency Injection and Service Container: Laravel tends to manage class dependencies with service containers. It promotes the use of dependency injection and inversion of control, making code modular, and easy to test and maintain.
  
• Large Community Support: Laravel boasts an active and vibrant community of developers that offers documentation, tutorials, and readily available packages, making it convenient to get solutions to challenges and understand best practices.   

• Robust Security: The robust security features of Laravel offer high-end security to secure your website against web attacks. These protect you against threats such as cross-site scripting (XSS), SQL injection attacks, and the like. 

Pros and Cons of Laravel

Following are the pros and cons of Laravel if we name a few! 

Real-life examples of Projects Using Laravel

Numerous websites out there leverage Laravel’s competencies, however, here are a few examples we want to explore: 

OctoberCMS

Built using Laravel, this open-source content management system (CMS) leverages the competencies of this framework, providing a develop-friendly environment to manage content, plugins, and interactions efficiently. The decision has proven excellently effective. 

Barchart

Barchart is a leading financial market data and trading solutions provider that outperformed the challenge of providing real-time data and analytics tools after choosing Laravel. Adopting this framework and using its event broadcasting and task scheduling, Barchart.com obtained the capability in terms of real-time data delivery. 

What is CodeIgniter?

CodeIgniter tends to be a lightweight PHP framework providing high-speed web application development. The framework’s small footprint separates it apart from others and makes it a reliable framework for developers, emphasizing value, enhanced efficiency, and performance.   

CodeIgniter has a rich set of libraries that allow you to write clean code, thereby, simplifying the procedure of software development. Besides, the framework has Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture that enables you to separate the presentation layer and the business logic.   

Uses Statistics of CodeIgniter 

According to BuiltWith, 356,961 websites are currently using CodeIgniter, while 1,074,932 sites used this technology previously, and 35,965 websites in India are currently using it. 

Key Features of CodeIgniter

The following are the key features of CodeIgniter: 

• MVC Architecture: CodeIgniter is based on the MVC (Model-View-Controler) architecture pattern that tends to separate application logic, data access, and presentation, enhancing code organization, reusability, and maintainability.
• Streamlined Development: The very framework allows streamlined web app development, assisting you to get the product to market in a short span of time. 
• Lightweight Core: It incorporates a minimal footprint, making it easy to learn and use, specifically for beginners. It helps you load more libraries on-demand to meet specific project needs. 
• Query Builder: Query builder in CodeIgniter makes database interaction way more efficient with a user-friendly interface intending to write database queries. It puts an end to the need to write raw SQL statements, ensuring accessible database interaction. 
• Session Management: Session management is crucial to maintain user data and authentication throughout the website interaction. The reliable session management tools like file-based or database-driven session storage in CodeIgniter efficiently address this need. 

• Database Classes: CodeIgniter offers comprehensive database libraries that augment different database platforms, allowing you to choose the one that excellently fits your project requirements. 
• Form and Data Validation: The built-in form validation library in CodeIgniter makes user input validation easier. It allows you to set rules for the form fields, craft tailored validation functions, along with checking ease of checking whether the submitted information can meet the required criteria. 
• Upgrades and Maintenance: CodeIgniter provides a reliable release schedule, allowing developers to keep their apps aligned with real-time web development standards and security best practices. It ensures consistency in updates and maintenance. 
• Robust Security: CodeIgniter provides built-in security features ranging from Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) filtering, CSRF Protection, SQL Injection Prevention, and the like, ensuring your app’s optimal security against vulnerabilities. 

Pros and Cons of CodeIgniter

There are plenty, however, the following are some of the key pros and cons of CodeIgniter you should know: 

Real-life Examples of Projects Using CodeIgniter

Numerous websites out there leverage CodeIgniter’s competencies; however, mentioned below are a few examples we would like to explore: 

A2 Hosting

A prominent web hosting service provider, A2 Hosting, enhanced its website’s performance and user experience when employed CodeIgniter. Using this technology, A2 Hosting elevated its website’s loading speed, strengthened its security, and made updates and maintenance way easier, ensuring the next level of user experience. 

Buffer

Buffer is a social media management platform that leveraged the power of CodeIgniter, enabling itself to provide a seamless and engaging user experience on its marketing website. 

Berkeley

The University of California, Berkeley used CodeIgniter intending to develop a dynamic and user-friendly online platform. The framework’s flexibility enabled Berkeley to create a tailored web app and modules, accelerating both academic and administrative functionalities. 

Laravel Vs CodeIgniter: End-to-End Comparison

Take a sneak peek at the table below showcasing the difference between CodeIgniter and Laravel:

What Is The Difference Between Laravel and CodeIgniter?

The above-mentioned table gives you a glance at the differences between Laravel and CodeIgniter, however, a detailed exploration is essential. Here’s an intensive analysis of CodeIgniter vs Laravel for an in-depth understanding: 

Laravel vs CodeIgniter: Learning Curve

Wrapping your head around Laravel’s features isn’t a big deal if you’re comfortable with PHP and MVC architecture. However, its steep learning curve might make learning this framework time-consuming for beginners. 

CodeIgniter, on the other hand, has a shallow learning curve that makes it convenient for developers to learn and use this framework. 

Laravel vs CodeIgniter: Speed & Performance

“CodeIgniter vs Laravel which is faster?” Have you ever raised this question in your mind?  If yes, here is the answer! 

Laravel lags behind CodeIgniter in terms of performance, however, you shouldn’t mistake its low speed with less power. Laravel can handle complex tasks, and the performance and speed can be optimized by adopting optimization best practices. 

You can do it by limiting unused libraries, implementing routes caching, and smart config, optimizing composer autoload and classmap, and using the JIT compiler. 

A lightweight framework with a core, the CodeIgniter comes with only a few small libraries. The core system requests an additional library as needed, making CodeIgniter faster compared to Laravel. 

Laravel vs CodeIgniter: Database Support 

Laravel supports a variety of databases which involve SQLite, SQL Server, MySQL, and PostgreSQL,  The Eloquent ORM with fluent syntax in Laravel assists ease the database operations, enabling you to work with various database systems. 

CodeIgniter also ensures compatibility with multiple databases such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, SQLite, Oracle, and many more. The simplified query builder in CodeIgniter makes it easy for developers to interact with several database systems. 

Laravel vs CodeIgniter: Unit Testing

Laravel offers a built-in unit testing feature known as PHPUnit. The very feature allows developers to test the application code intensively.

CodeIgniter denies providing any such built-in unit testing support. CodeIgniter developers need to rely on third-party unit testing tools as far as texting of the code quality and application is concerned. 

Laravel vs CodeIgniter: Customization

Laravel follows a modular design and service container that allows convenient third-party package integration and next-level customization. What’s more, it provides configuration files, enabling developers to fine-tune various development aspects. 

CodeIgniter allows customization to let developers simply extend the framework to meet specific needs. It makes it easier for developers to use the framework for various use cases. Furthermore, it also accommodates extensions and hooks, assisting developers to modify certain functionalities with no need to modify the core database. 

Laravel vs CodeIgniter: Authentication

Laravel provides the authentication class feature to ease the authentication and authorization for web apps. 

On the other hand, in CodeIgniter, developers need to write custom CodeIgniter extensions when it comes to user authentication and authorization.

Laravel vs CodeIgniter: Modularity Features 

The Built-in modules in Laravel, enable developers to separate parts of a big project into smaller modules. With this, developers are capable of working on them separately. 

The CodeIgniter framework doesn’t provide any such built-in module, putting developers in need of using extensions when creating and maintaining separate modules. 

Laravel vs CodeIgniter: DBMS Support

Laravel provides complete support for Oracle, DB2**,** PostgreSQL OrientDB, IBM, MySQL, JDBC, and many others. 

CodeIgniter also provides support for the above-mentioned database management systems except JDBC, and IBM. Furthermore, the CodeIgniter framework tends to support MongoDB and Microsoft BI. 

Laravel vs CodeIgniter: HTTP Routes 

Using Laravel, the developers are able to define custom HTTP routes and create custom URLs for each HTTP route. 

CodeIgniter tends to use the response and request mechanism for setting up HTTP routes.  Developers using CodeIgniter need to create paths to simplify data transmission. 

Laravel vs CodeIgniter: Community Support

Laravel outperforms CodeIgniter in terms of community support, as it has a much more extensive community than that of CodeIgniter. The PHP framework makes use of first-party tools such as Vapor, and Forge along with an immense collection of packages available via Packalyst. 

CodeIgniter has a developer community which much smaller in size with a design aimed at simplicity and fewer dependencies. 

Laravel vs CodeIgniter: Scalability

Both are scalable however, Laravel is more likely to be suitable for big projects. As it features caching, queues, and native support for an API, Laravel efficiently manages even huge applications.

CodeIgniter is also scalable, it needs next-level customization. At times, you need third-party tools to get similar scalability as that of Laravel. 

Laravel vs CodeIgniter: API Handling 

Since Laravel uses a Blade templating engine that is similar to common HTML files, it is simple and way more coherent compared to many other templating engines. With a random token fed to every user, the framework has a convenient solution for API authentication. Besides, its resourceful controllers enable the creation of REST APIs.

CodeIgniter, on the other hand, has a basic templating engine named Template Parser Class. When working with CodeIgniter, can work with pure CSS and HTML files. Developers can integrate third-party templating engines, too, like Smarty, Twig, and the like. The framework also provides an API response trait you can make use of with any controller to simplify common response types with no need to remember which HTTPS status codes to return. 

Laravel vs CodeIgniter Security

Laravel outsmarts CodeIgniter in security, too. The framework provides built-in security features such as XSS protection, and CSRF protection, along with hashed passwords using Argon or Bcrypt. It offers a conveniently implementable access control and authentication system. Besides, its out-of-the-box security best practices make it easier to develop completely secure applications. 

CodeIgniter provides protection against common web vulnerabilities which include XSS (Cross-Site Scripting), and CSRF (Cross-Site Request Forgery). The framework owns highly efficient encryption and decryption features intending to secure sensitive data. As it includes basic security measures, for advanced security, you need to configure it with a manual setup. 

Conclusion: Which One to Choose Between Laravel and CodeIgniter? 

Laravel is an innovative, feature-rich PHP framework that provides seamless updates and integration. CodeIgniter is easy to learn and offers faster speed and performance but lacks in providing optimal features and funcitonalities.

We compared Laravel vs CodeIgniter and came to know various aspects about them including their market statistics, features, pros, and cons. Besides, the comprehensive comparison brought us to the conclusion which one is the right for a project. 

Now that you know various aspects about them it depends on your project need which one will suit your project the most. If you have a project that you want solutions for, contact us as we, at IT Path Solutions are a leading software development company with expertise in PHP development. 

We’ll help you bring the right solutions to the table for your business growth as we’ve done for various businesses across the globe.