🔧 Laravel is perfect for SaaS

🕛 Zeit seit Veröffentlichung: 52 Tage, 17 Stunden 37 Minuten
📆 Veröffentlicht am: 04.03.2025 um 09:44 Uhr
Nachrichtenbereich: 🔧 Programmierung
🔗 Quelle: dev.to

This is a bit different from my regular posts; more of an appreciation of Laravel and PHP. Even though I feel Django is probably one of, if not the best-architected frameworks, Laravel is a pretty solid choice for rapid development.

I have been using PHP for ions now, even though it's not one of the most widely liked languages, still! it's one of the most pragmatic.

SaaS boilerplates are overhyped

If you do a Google search or look in places like Reddit, you'll find loads of Next.js boilerplates. Nothing wrong with Next.js at all, but as a Solo SaaS founder who's self-bootstrapped, I need to ship fast.

To be fair, I have a much deeper understanding of PHP than Next.js but I am really experienced in JavaScript and web development in general, so getting proficient in Next.js is not complicated for me.

Furthermore, I have built many React apps so I have a good understanding of React and how it works.

Most of these boilerplates only include some ORM setup, a basic dashboard, auth, and billing.

In my opinion, besides annoying billing! The rest are so easy to scaffold in nearly every language.

Queues, CRUD, emails, CRON Jobs

The pain in most business-centric apps is CRUD. How quickly can you spin up a table with pagination, and ADD/EDIT forms?

Very few of these boilerplates cater to this functionality, yet most web apps heavily rely on CRUD for users to manage their resources and accounts.

Laravel out of the box provides:

1. A decent-looking email template for transactional emails.
2. Adapters for SMTP and many other providers like Resend.
3. Queues and a powerful dashboard for managing queues called Horizon.
4. Auth system including many starter kits such as breeze, jetstream, and the new V12 react/vue/livewire templates.
5. CRUD kits like Nova, Backpack, and Filament.
6. Artisan commands and a scheduler (basically cron jobs).

Laravel is by far the most complete framework for building SaaS applications.

What do I dislike about Laravel?

Laravel is bloated with lots of magic under the hood, they move fast and sometimes break backward compatibility. They chop and change quite a bit, for example, recently the starter kits they recommend do not include a pure Blade option, yet Blade has been the default template engine for Laravel since forever.

Despite these shortcomings, the fact that most of these packages are from Laravel the company (and mostly free), and even when they change the recommendations, they still tend to support older packages with bugfixes and security updates for many years.

The framework is not perfect, but it's still the most complete stack I have ever worked with and just makes you so productive that these shortcomings are not really a deal breaker.

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