Laravel Homestead vs Mist.io: What are the differences?

Laravel Homestead: The official Laravel local development environment (Vagrant box). Laravel Homestead is an official, pre-packaged Vagrant "box" that provides you a wonderful development environment without requiring you to install PHP, HHVM, a web server, and any other server software on your local machine. Homestead runs on any Windows, Mac, or Linux system, and includes the Nginx web server, PHP 5.6, MySQL, Postgres, Redis, Memcached, and all of the other goodies you need to develop amazing Laravel applications; Mist.io: Manage and monitor servers across clouds with any web device. Create, reboot or destroy virtual machines. View their metadata, tag and search them. Assign keys and send SSH commands through the web. Enable monitoring, alerting & automation. You'll know right away if anything goes wrong. You'll be able to address issues from anywhere, using your phone or tablet.

Laravel Homestead can be classified as a tool in the "Virtual Machine" category, while Mist.io is grouped under "Cloud Management".

Some of the features offered by Laravel Homestead are:

• Ubuntu 14.04
• PHP 5.6
• HHVM

On the other hand, Mist.io provides the following key features:

• Supports AWS, Rackspace, OpenStack, and Linode
• Friendly- Adapts to each device to provide the best possible user experience. Enables you to connect from anywhere, anytime.
• Secure- All traffic uses high grade encryption. Every line of code is regularly audited to ensure the safety of your data.

Laravel Homestead is an open source tool with 3.67K GitHub stars and 1.46K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Laravel Homestead's open source repository on GitHub.