Laravel is a server-side web framework for PHP, created by Taylor Otwell in 2011. It follows an MVC structure and ships an opinionated stack for routing, dependency injection, validation, queues, scheduling, and authentication out of the box.
The core pieces engineers interact with daily are Eloquent, an active-record ORM that maps classes to database tables and expresses relationships as methods; Blade, a lightweight templating engine that compiles to plain PHP; and Artisan, a Symfony Console-based CLI that scaffolds code, runs migrations, and drives background workers. Laravel leans heavily on Symfony components (HTTP foundation, routing, console) underneath, and integrates with Redis and database-backed queues, Horizon for queue monitoring, Echo for WebSockets, and Sanctum or Passport for API tokens and OAuth2. Recent versions add first-class support for Laravel Octane, which runs the framework on Swoole, RoadRunner, or FrankenPHP for persistent-process performance.
In the PHP ecosystem Laravel competes with Symfony and, at a smaller scale, CodeIgniter and Slim. It dominates the “full-stack PHP for SaaS” niche and underpins commercial offerings like Forge, Vapor (serverless on AWS Lambda), and the Livewire + Alpine.js frontend stack.