Having used both, I would say that both took time to learn (knowing some PHP != knowing Laravel), but I liked the end result a lot better with Phoenix. Also, go with Phoenix if you like sleeping through the night. As you mentioned, Phoenix definitely performs well under heavy load (1000s of concurrent users for $10-20/mo is reasonable). When it comes time to deploy, Phoenix is a little harder to set up, but then it runs well. Forever. With virtually no maintainance (especially if you pick a host that manages the OS for you). PHP is easier to get up and running at first, but it takes more work and a fair bit of experience get it running fast and securely (and then you have to stay on top of the security updates). I have decades of experience hosting PHP sites and I still wouldn't call it easy or comfortable. A third option would be some kind of serverless solution (I use Cloudflare Workers and Firebase Functions). The upside is (near-) limitless scaling, and the downside is (near-) limitless costs. (And, for anything other than Cloudflare Workers, cold starts.)