Laravel Homestead vs Vagrant Cloud: What are the differences?

Developers describe Laravel Homestead as "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. On the other hand, Vagrant Cloud is detailed as "Share, discover, and create Vagrant environments". Vagrant Cloud pairs with Vagrant to enable access, insight and collaboration across teams, as well as to bring exposure to community contributions and development environments.

Laravel Homestead and Vagrant Cloud are primarily classified as "Virtual Machine" and "Virtual Machine Platforms & Containers" tools respectively.

Some of the features offered by Laravel Homestead are:

• Ubuntu 14.04
• PHP 5.6
• HHVM

On the other hand, Vagrant Cloud provides the following key features:

• Vagrant Share: A single command to share your local Vagrant environment to anyone in the world
• Box Distribution: Vagrant integration provides flexible versioning and support for private or community boxes
• Discover Boxes: Start new projects faster using the right box. Find trusted and top-used community boxes

Laravel Homestead is an open source tool with 3.11K GitHub stars and 1.32K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Laravel Homestead's open source repository on GitHub.