We recommend Laravel over Ruby on Rails (Ruby) and Express.js (JavaScript/Node.js). We chose Laravel ourselves for our own internal software project, recently after comparing these same 3 software frameworks. In selecting Laravel, we chose to build our app using the software language PHP. PHP has the largest market share of all the web-based software languages (close to 80% of all websites use PHP). Also, Laravel is the fastest-growing software framework based on PHP making it a wise choice.

We also plan to integrate WordPress and WooCommerce later with our Laravel web-app. WordPress and WooCommerce like Laravel are all built using PHP. WordPress is the most popular Content Management System in the world. This will allow us to build out the front-end marketing website in WordPress. Also, we plan to offer subscriptions and sell products. For this, we will use WooCommerce. WooCommerce is the most used e-commerce platform in the world. We’ll be able to use our same Laravel developers to extend our app to WordPress and WooCommerce. By standardizing on PHP, we’ll be able to use the same software developers on all 3 platforms. PHP’s large market share will be an asset to us as we start recruiting talented software developers.

Lastly, we are gaining access to a fast-growing and awesome community that supports Laravel. Before we made our decision, I personally met Laravel’s founder Taylor Otwell along with several of his team members. After meeting with the Laravel team at Laracon US in New York City and learning more about the direction they are going with the framework, we’re confident we made the right decision.

To read the longer version of this answer where we go into more detail behind our recommendation, visit https://rackless.com/laravel-rails-expressjs

Before I recommend a tool, I think it is important to look at your requirements and capabilities - as you have looked at 3 very different tools: different programming languages, different implementation strategies and different target audience. It sounds like you don't already have a set of dedicated developers, so it is likely that your choice should be mainly driven by how easy it is to get developers that are familiar with the tools - so I'm going to list some considerations that I think you should review, starting with what I believe would be the most important for your bootstrap process:

1. Mindshare: how easy it is to get developers that are familiar with the technology and can immediately start working on your project. This is definitely where Node.js shines - Javascript is one of the fastest growing languages and Node.js played a huge part in this. I would bet that wherever you are located, Javascript developers would be the easiest to come by.

2. Fit for purpose: from your description we can understand that you are looking at a backend technology to implement some sort of REST API for a mobile app. The 3 different options you offered each fit on a different place on such a stack: Ruby is a programming language and not even a service framework - if you choose it, you then have to choose a server implementation and REST framework (and there are a lot, mostly as Ruby has a standard API for connecting a web server and application frameworks, and so this space has blown up) it used to be that Rails was the most popular, so you may choose that, but the interest in it has waned a bit in recent years; Node.js is a server framework, but it also has a dominant application framework called Express, that is geared well to your usage, so you'd likely work with that; Laravel is an application framework - it uses the PHP programming language, whose use has declined a bit in recent years, and was originally built for MVC type applications - though it has workflows for REST APIs and would probably work well for you as well.

3. Scalability: while this is probably the least significant issue at the moment (when it gets to a point where the backend service is your bottleneck, you'd likely have enough resources for a rewrite), and also the most dependent on factors that you didn't specify and are hard to estimate (such as: session complexity; amounts of data; sensitivity to locality; sensitivity to latency), it is still worthy to address it. Unfortunately, I don't have any good news: Ruby is notoriously bad at getting the best performance (the current BKM for milking performance from a Ruby codebase is to run the app on the Java virtual machine); Node.js has severe memory limitations that will make it very hard to scale if your backend needs to do a lot of work (I have a very personal and troubling experience with this issue); and PHP has as many scalability optimization strategies as there are PHP developers (this is not a good thing).

My suggestion to you as to how to proceed can be summarized to this prioritized list of options: 1. Get a good head developer with a lot of experience and let them choose the best tool - they'd likely go with what they know, which is likely to be a good choice - and if not, when scalability will become an issue, you could rewrite. 2. Choose something (likely Node.js) and don't worry about scalability - see (1) above. 3. Use Vert.x: it is a highly scalable application and service framework that offers great performance as well as a lot of tools to solve data scalability, locality and latency, and it works with multiple programming languages, such as Javascript and Ruby.

Node.js would be the best choice among all, you can compare all 3 of them on Stackshare and you will find that Node.js is on the top on almost every aspect, and since your focus is primarily on Performance and Scalability you won't regret after choosing Node.js. Also, the JavaScript open-source community has made a lot of effort and created numerous packages that will give you the speed and smooth execution of your project you need. Though your question was regarding backend, but if you choose JavaScript(Node.js) at your backend, then you can have a cross-functional team that can work on both, frontend as well as backend because JavaScript is everywhere, React Native for Android and iOS apps, React.js for single page web apps and Node.js ofcourse for your backend. And I don't have to tell you how much easier it would be to code and manage in a single language to build your complete system end-to-end. I hope it helps.

That's a really ambitious project. So you're going to want to move as quickly as possible. That means choosing a software stack that will allow you to move the most quickly. Of the ones you've listed, Ruby (Ruby on Rails, more precisely) will give you that. There are probably other options that would allow you to move even more quickly than Rails, but developers for those more advanced stacks are much more expensive, and hard to find.

Rails can and does scale to millions of users. It's not necessarily easy, but if you're running a successful app, you'll be able to afford people to help you scale out when you reach that point. But if you choose a slower framework (or have bad developers) you won't even reach the point of needing scalability.

For starters flask provides a beautiful and easy way to create REST APIs. Also its supported by excellent beginner docs as well as a very active community. Another good thing with Flask is its widely available list of plugins which allow you to build as you go. Its also good in performance and can scale to a quite decent level. However, if you are sure your project is going to be fairly big, it would be better to start with Django as it provides a lot of features out of the box and is extremely stable in performance. Both these frameworks have support for Swagger, JWT, Coverage Report although you have to install plugins for them. Deploying both of these are fairly simple and there is huge documentation available. Django has one of the best documentations I have come across. I hope I was able to answer your queries.

I would lean between Drupal and Laravel. Peer to peer selling shouldn't be too hard to set up using Drupal Commerce based modules (search for Marketplace). But if you don't find most of your requirements being met, you might want to go with Laravel. I know there are modules for Drupal that would help you achieve most of your requirements, so I would suggest doing some research there first.

It has the necessary packages for what you need, in addition to optimizing your time with what is needed.

Our base code

Depends where you find more confortable, ever tech work good. the most important is the what do you are looking in you scalable project

It has the necessary packages for what you need, in addition to optimizing your time with what is needed.

Node.js is great but if I had a choice for something like this I would pick Elixir and Phoenix. They have LiveViews and channels which be one step up then the other 3 plateforms. It will also scale better and respond faster. Last will probably far less code as well.

Node.js is the perfect tech to real-time features like chats, forums, quizzes and polls. Additionally it has great support for objects storage like Mongodb and its important for file media management.

I would suggest you to pick the right stack for the right purpose. My suggestion would be to go for Microservices approach and break your app into smaller pieces according to the type of functionality like you mentioned above. E.g if you would be expecting the high traffic on you platform, then Node.js can be used as the endpoint there to handle that traffic. Normal form processing can be done in Laravel but I would not suggest codeigniter as managing code is difficult there.

So this way you can decide do architecture you app and can use the best of the feature from all the languages. Even it would be easier for you to manage your app based on the functionality and team who will be working on that. Hope you would like my suggestions.

Node is light and scalable and has been used widely for enterprise solutions that need faster response, reliability and better performance. But at the end of the day, for me, when I start a project, I don't shoot for the stars. I build a small application with the possibility to scale in the future that will test my business idea. If the idea is getting volume then I really start thinking about how am I going to build this aiming a specific volume.

Hello , Our first version of www.voilacabs.com was programed with Code Ignitor PHP API's, and at times during peak hours when there were huge request's made the response time use to vary from 500 MS to 1 Minute, also at time's we might have to end up restarting PHP-FPM which use to bring things to normal.

Also PHP lacks features like promises queue, Asyc task, etc. which is supported in Node.js. In our V1 release we shifted to Node.js and since last 7 month's we see no lag in any API response, also all our API's are responding in 200-300 Milli Second's with about 8000+ Fleet's in peak hours. So my suggestion is to go with Node.js also you can either go with Mysql or MongoDB ( depending on the usage ) for DB choice's.

When it comes to hosting you can go with group replication which can be replicated across 3 different datacenters for your data safety. This approach will make your system largely scalable at 80% less price then amazon webservcies.

I hope that help's .

Hey Mohammad,

In your case I would definitely recommend Node.js as you already seem familiar with JavaScript and that experience will give definitely help you accomplish things faster in the backend side. The best advice I've always seen is to use what you already know, or something you enjoy using, and your passion will do the rest. As some folks have mentioned, Node.js is single-threaded by default but there's a lot of resources available on how to overcome that. Both Node.js and PHP have scaled for many companies, the examples are endless. If something gets heavy you offload it to a background job, if your reads and writes are getting heavy you can do some database optimizations, use an in-memory database and/or caching layers. Most scaling problems are related to how you read/write/process data and infrastructure more than they are to frameworks and programming languages. If you do indeed hit a wall with either of those programming languages being a bottleneck then in you could rewrite that one component only in a more performant language (e.g. Go/Rust/C/C++/Crystal and so on) but that's most likely something you won't have to think about for quite a while. Focus on the stack that you know so you can acquire more users and get to launch your product, scaling problems are nice to have and can be solved if they happen.

Good luck!

I have used both node and php in different projects. If it is true that initially node has better performance, in reality there is not much difference and feeling comfortable in the environment you use is very important. Also well written and optimized code. Php is also used by small and large companies. We have a file processing project that responds in less than 300ms with thousands of concurrent users and more than a million daily visits. And the key is to be able to develop quickly and efficiently. Personally I am much better in php than in node, so my code in php is much more clean and optimal than in node, so that's my option. I also find it easier to find php professionals than node, something very important to consider in a project. So the answer would be: choose the environment with which you feel more comfortable, because it will be with which you will have to fight every day.

Node is single-threaded by default, so you'll need to work on it. In the other hand, Node is better because you are already working with JavaScript as Frontend developer. Also, all you need is to make a prototype and Node is great for building simple API prototypes so I think the best way would be: make a nodejs prototype and test it - you'll get numbers with which you can work later. Take a look at Artillery.io and Mocha for testing. After that you can ask for someone's help in rewriting some endpoints or even make a separate api endpoint using another framework / language. Nginx would be helpful in this.

You can also have a look as Symfony. This has individual components that you can use based on the problem you are solving. In fact, Laravel users few of the Symfony components at core.

Laravel is a great solution to build web-based application using php. Of course it is matter which php version will you use, but php is much easier to develop, maintain and deploy.

Laravel has the necessary resources for you to develop a product (MVP) in which you can scale it over time. Despite saving development time.

It's a general development question, be more specific, because /dev/std... is a generic approach, not a targeted development. You want to develop PHP or Java? Both are good in their terms, but it's your decision. For PHP Laravel is a robust and exhaustive console enabled framework, featuring rich integrations with virtualization & REST. On the other hand, Spring will bring you learning curve if you are switching from PHP and so on. Try to match your needs with project requirements, it will be easier.

Laravel is lighter weight. Spring Boot quickly becomes a handful, as you'll be downloading hundreds of megabytes in dependencies for a few functions and a dynamic dependency there. There are multiple problems that are solved by "download and put it on your classpath by whatever means. Spring framework will automatically detect it and resolve the issue". It's magical when things work, but my teams have constantly found the limits of the framework's utility and starting points of their burden.

While my expertise with Laravel is more limited, I haven't seen this kind of mess in that community and God bless 'em for it.

Laravel all the way. i like the documentation, simplicity, and scalability