Laravel VS Yii2

Compare Laravel vs Yii2 and see what are their differences.

Laravel

Laravel is a web application framework with expressive, elegant syntax. We’ve already laid the foundation for your next big idea — freeing you to create without sweating the small things. (by laravel)

Yii2

Yii 2: The Fast, Secure and Professional PHP Framework (by yiisoft)
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Laravel Yii2
416 32
80,647 14,269
1.1% 0.0%
8.8 8.9
5 days ago 7 days ago
Blade PHP
MIT License BSD 3-clause "New" or "Revised" License
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

Laravel

Posts with mentions or reviews of Laravel. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2025-04-18.
  • Everything about AI Function Calling (MCP), the keyword for Agentic AI
    10 projects | dev.to | 18 Apr 2025
    If you're planning to convert a backend server to an AI agent using function calling, avoid languages and frameworks that require developers to manually write JSON schemas, such as PHP Laravel and Java Spring RestDocs.
  • A Structured Workflow for "Vibe Coding" Full-Stack Apps
    3 projects | dev.to | 16 Apr 2025
    Using a full-stack framework with batteries-included, such as Wasp for JavaScript (React, Node.js, Prisma) or Laravel for PHP, takes the complexity out of piecing the different parts of the stack together. Since these frameworks are opinionated, they've chosen a set of tools that work well together, and the have the added benefit of doing a lot of work under-the-hood. In the end, the AI can focus on just the business logic of the app.
  • How to Implement Google Login in Laravel
    1 project | dev.to | 1 Apr 2025
    Laravel installed (version 8+ recommended)
  • Laravel is How Development Should Be
    1 project | dev.to | 31 Mar 2025
    I have been learning Laravel. If you read this article of mine you will recall I said I wouldn't reach for Laravel because I already use TYPO3. I had to walk back that statement when I realised while I have TYPO3, it is better suited to more involved projects.
  • Ask HN: What's the ideal stack for a solo dev in 2025
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Mar 2025
    I'll echo @ejs and say it depends, but I'm a huge fan of Laravel (https://laravel.com/)! The team recently released some updated starter kits (https://laravel.com/starter-kits) as well which are nice (Vue, React, and Livewire)

    For the uninitiated, Laravel is an opinionated, "batteries included" stack that lets you get right to the meat of the application without spending time working on authentication, routing, html templating, and so much more.

    There are also several (paid) resources the organization provides that allow you to get your app hosted pretty quickly (see Forge and Cloud).

  • How To Use React JS In a Laravel Project
    3 projects | dev.to | 19 Mar 2025
    If you want to explore Laravel further, check out its official site.
  • 19+ Laravel Best Practices for Developers in 2024
    4 projects | dev.to | 14 Mar 2025
    Laravel is a popular and respected open-source, free PHP programming language framework that is aimed at making development processes appealing without having to sacrifice quality. It uses an MVC (Model View Controller) pattern which makes the language more relatable and adaptable. It can also be regarded as a web application framework with expressive and elegant syntax that attempts to take the pain out of development by easing common tasks used in web projects and applications.
  • 2025 Best PHP Micro Frameworks: Slim, Flight, Fat-Free, Lumen, and More!
    12 projects | dev.to | 27 Feb 2025
    Lumen sneaks into our top four as Laravel’s little sibling, designed for microservices and APIs. It’s got a minimalist vibe, but here’s the tea: it’s basically Laravel Lite, carrying some of the same heft under the hood. While it’s fast for a Laravel offshoot, its performance lags behind true micro frameworks like Flight or Slim—check the TechEmpower benchmarks for proof.
  • Laravel modular folder structure
    1 project | dev.to | 22 Feb 2025
    Most people that know Laravel know the AppServiceProvider. I'm named it ModuleServiceProvider and only have the boot method. Because I'm going to use modules in the app directory I removed the Http/Controllers and Models directories. For this post I'm going to use a User module to demonstrate the folder structure.
  • How Laravel Generates Access Tokens
    1 project | dev.to | 18 Feb 2025
    Access tokens are a critical part of modern web applications, especially when it comes to API authentication. Laravel, one of the most popular PHP frameworks, provides robust tools for generating and managing access tokens. Whether you're building a complex OAuth2 server or a simple token-based authentication system, Laravel has you covered with Passport and Sanctum.

Yii2

Posts with mentions or reviews of Yii2. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-02-13.
  • Top 12 PHP Frameworks For Web Development in 2024
    13 projects | dev.to | 13 Feb 2024
    Yii is one of the oldest PHP frameworks, acronym as Yes It Is! It has 14.2k stars and 7k forks on GitHub. It is a fast, secure, and flexible PHP framework for web development, especially for building MVC architecture websites. It is an Object-Oriented PHP framework that requires knowledge of inheritance, polymorphism, etc.
  • Yii framework – An easy to learn PHP MVC framework
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 21 Aug 2023
  • 🔥 Yii Database abstraction release
    8 projects | /r/PHP | 12 Apr 2023
  • Creating an application # 5 - install using sub directory
    2 projects | /r/yii3 | 14 Jan 2023
    In Yii Framework we have a middleware that will allow us to access our applications without the need to point the web server to the public directory of each template, so we will use the middleware SubFolder::class.
  • Slim, possívelmente o framework ideal para quem vem do Golang
    14 projects | dev.to | 14 Jan 2023
  • Assets #2 - installation
    5 projects | /r/yii3 | 13 Jan 2023
    asset-packagist: This is the traditional Yii2 way, here we will add the following to our composer.json.
  • Assets #1 - definitions
    5 projects | /r/yii3 | 13 Jan 2023
    It is often preferable to manage Yii Assets programmatically. For example, when you use the widget in a page, it will automatically include the required css and javascript files, instead of asking you to manually find these files and include them. And when you upgrade the widget to a new version, it will automatically use the new version of the Yii Assets. In this tutorial, we will describe the powerful Yii Assets management capability provided in Yii Framework .
  • Creating an application #2 - the concept of configuration
    2 projects | /r/yii3 | 13 Jan 2023
    As we can see in the example above, we have defined the configuration of our packages in files .php (it doesn’t matter if they are YiiFramework packages or not), this allows us to define the configuration of each component in a very simple way to understand.
  • Templates available in Yii3.
    11 projects | /r/yii3 | 11 Jan 2023
    Now if we want to create an extension, under the code standard used in the Yii Framework v.3 packages, we can use yiisoft/template, provides us the tools necessary for our code to comply with good coding standards they are:
  • Creating an application in Yii3 - part 3 the container di.
    5 projects | dev.to | 6 Jan 2023
    Now we understand how to do any configuration of any YiiFramework package or external, it is not necessary to have a single long and complex configuration file, we can organize it according to the group of configurations and Yii config will do the work for you, as well as the container it applies the definitions for you, with the automatic wiring facility in controllers, which makes it easy to access any container dependency without the need to use static access to it, or depend on the container itself.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Laravel and Yii2 you can also consider the following projects:

Spiral Framework - High-Performance PHP Framework

Phalcon - High performance, full-stack PHP framework delivered as a C extension.

Slim Framework - Slim is a PHP micro framework that helps you quickly write simple yet powerful web applications and APIs.

CodeIgniter - Open Source PHP Framework (originally from EllisLab)

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InfluxDB high-performance time series database
Collect, organize, and act on massive volumes of high-resolution data to power real-time intelligent systems.
influxdata.com
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Did you know that Blade is
the 45th most popular programming language
based on number of references?