Laravel developers prefer packages over custom code, 200-developer survey shows
A survey of 200 Laravel developers reveals how actively the PHP framework's ecosystem is being used for new development work, not just legacy maintenance.
82% of respondents develop new Laravel features daily or weekly, rising to 94% when including monthly developers. The survey, conducted in late 2025 by developer Andrei-Daniel Petrica, focused on the "build versus buy" question: when standard functionality is needed (SEO, media handling, payments), do developers write custom code or use packages?
The data suggests package adoption remains high, though specific percentages weren't disclosed in the initial findings. This aligns with Laravel's ecosystem strategy: the framework ships with integrated tools like Sanctum (API authentication), Cashier (billing), Horizon (queue monitoring), and Telescope (debugging).
What this means in practice
The survey timing matters. Laravel's commercial tooling expanded significantly in 2025, with Laravel Boost reaching 48% adoption among surveyed developers (39% haven't tried it). Boost competes with established solutions for application performance and deployment workflows.
Authentication remains a key decision point. Developers choosing between Sanctum, Passport, and JWT implementations face different trade-offs: Sanctum suits SPAs and mobile apps with token-based auth, Passport handles OAuth2 for complex integrations, while JWT libraries offer framework-agnostic portability. For microservices architectures, the choice depends on whether you're running an API gateway or service-to-service auth.
The framework's ORM performance continues to be scrutinized. Eloquent versus Doctrine comparisons show up in GitHub Actions workflows testing package performance, particularly for large datasets where ORM overhead matters.
Three things to watch
- Package benchmarking: Developers are increasingly running performance tests via GitHub Actions before committing to dependencies, especially for ORMs, charts, and e-commerce carts.
- Multi-tenancy solutions: Package comparisons for Laravel multi-tenancy implementations indicate growing SaaS adoption.
- UI framework consolidation: Laravel's own UI packages (Livewire, Inertia) compete with traditional Vue/React integrations, affecting which chart and component libraries get traction.
The survey's focus on active developers (not maintainers of legacy systems) suggests these patterns reflect current architectural decisions, not historical preferences. Worth noting: the 200-person sample size is small but targets daily practitioners.