Laravel ships routing, auth, queues, caching, mail, and a real-time dashboard for jobs as one cohesive framework — not a pile of hand-picked packages. For SaaS and admin-heavy platforms, that convention buys back weeks of plumbing decisions, and the ecosystem (Forge, Vapor, Nova, Cashier) covers deploy-to-billing without leaving the family.
Livewire when the team is PHP-first and the UI is mostly forms, tables, and server state — no separate JS build step, no API to version. Inertia when you want React or Vue's component model and client-side richness without building a REST or GraphQL layer underneath. We pick per surface, and both can live in the same app.
Laravel's built-in database queue driver gives database-backed queues with no extra infrastructure for moderate load. At scale we move to Horizon over Redis — supervisors, auto-balancing, and a real-time dashboard for retries and failures. Either way, jobs are idempotent and retried with backoff, not fire-and-forget.
Yes — about half our work is brownfield. We start with a Larastan baseline and a dependency audit, then upgrade one major version at a time behind the official upgrade guide, with the test suite as the safety net at every step. No jumping straight from Laravel 8 to 12 in one PR.
When p95 latency and CPU cost actually matter — high-traffic APIs, latency-sensitive endpoints — yes; keeping the app booted in memory via Swoole or RoadRunner removes bootstrap overhead on every request. For low-traffic admin tools or early-stage products, standard PHP-FPM is simpler to operate and we don't reach for Octane until the numbers justify it.
Pest for feature and unit tests — readable, fast, built on PHPUnit underneath. Larastan at max level catches type errors a dynamic language would otherwise hide until runtime. CI runs the full suite plus static analysis on every PR; nothing merges on a red build.
10 — Start
Let's build something worth shipping.
Two-week diagnostic, four-week MVP, twelve-week ground-up. Bring the brief — we'll send a plan, not a pitch deck.
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