I started my career building on CodeIgniter. It was simple, fast to learn, and got the job done for small projects. But as the projects I worked on grew larger and the teams around me grew bigger, the cracks started to show.
What CodeIgniter got right
CodeIgniter taught me the fundamentals: routing, MVC separation, working directly with a query builder. There's real value in understanding those building blocks without a framework doing everything for you.
Where it started to hurt
No built-in ORM worth relying on, weak testing support, and a much smaller ecosystem meant I was writing — and maintaining — a lot of boilerplate by hand. Authentication, queues, and background jobs were all things I had to bolt on myself.
What Laravel changed for me
Eloquent, migrations, queues, a real testing story, and a package ecosystem that covers almost anything you'd need. More importantly, Laravel's conventions make it easier for a team to work on the same codebase without stepping on each other.
- Faster to ship features without reinventing infrastructure
- Easier onboarding for new developers who already know the conventions
- A much bigger hiring pool of Laravel-familiar developers
I still have a soft spot for CodeIgniter — it's where I learned the basics. But for anything I build today, Laravel is the obvious choice.