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Add to SafariWhen comparing Express.js vs Laravel 5, the Slant community recommends Express.js for most people. In the question“What are the best backend web frameworks?” Express.js is ranked 3rd while Laravel 5 is ranked 8th. The most important reason people chose Express.js is:
Setting up a new Express project is very easy. It consists of installing a handful of libraries through NPM run a single `npm install` and everything is ready to go.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Setting up is very easy
Setting up a new Express project is very easy. It consists of installing a handful of libraries through NPM run a single npm install and everything is ready to go.
Pro Great routing API
Express' extremely powerful routing API allows developers to do tasks ranging from building a REST API to building the routes for a simple web app and then take it to the next level by using route parameters and query strings.
Pro Great for beginner Node.js programmers
With a little learning curve, it is a good choice for new NodeJS developers to get started quickly. Express boasts great, thorough documentation.
Pro Express.js is in the Node.js Foundation Incubator Program
Node.js Foundation
Announcement here
The Node.js Foundation is a Collaborative Project at The Linux Foundation. Linux Foundation Collaborative Projects are independently funded software projects that harness the power of collaborative development to fuel innovation across industries and ecosystems.
Pro Relatively mature
Being a somewhat old Node.js web app framework and being one of the most widely used frameworks, Express.js has matured quite a lot during all that time. It's more stable than its competitors and a huge community backing it.
Pro Support for a lot of plugins
Express takes advantage of Node's NPM to distribute and install countless plugins made by third parties which solve almost anything a developer would want to do with Express.
Pro Has the largest userbase
It's by far the most popular framework for node.
Pro Great supportive community
Express has a big community with a lot of guides and tutorials written about it by developers that have been using it for quite some time.
Pro Good Oauth/Facebook integration with connect module
You can easily add oAuth integration/social logins to your next web app without much hassle, using this authentication middleware for connect.
Pro Has detailed information
Very simple and fast.
Pro Lightweight
Pro Massive ecosystem of middleware
If you have not already checked out the Express.js ecosystem of middleware, you should.
Pro Good for building RESTful APIs
With migrations, powerful and intuitive Eloquent CRUD, resource routing, and simple JSON response out of the box, a complete REST API can be written in hours.
Pro Comes with an excellent built-in ORM
Laravel's Eloquent ORM is a simple and fast Object-Relational Mapping which helps with organizing the application's database. It supports the most popular databases (MySQL, Postgres, SQLite, etc.) out of the box.
Pro Good documentation
Laravel's documentation is thorough and very good. It covers everything and is very helpful to experienced and new users alike.
Pro Handles event queuing
Laravel supports event queuing and it does so in a very simple way. To create an event that should be queued just run:
php artisan handler:event SendPurchaseConfirmation --event=PodcastWasPurchased --queued
This creates a handler that implements the Illuminate\Contracts\Queue\ShouldBeQueued interface. Now when this handler is called it will automatically be queued by the event dispatcher.
Pro Comes with its own CLI
Laravel comes out of the box with it's own CLI called Artisan. With Artisan developers can do several different tasks such as migrating databases, seeding databases, clearing the cache and much much more.
Pro Easy to write web apps with authentication
Laravel comes with Authentication capabilities and a fully-powered Auth class out of the box. For passwords it uses bcrypt.
Pro Easy to learn
Pro Gives developers a great degree of freedom in how they set up their project structure
Laravel allows for free configuration and does not force developers to use a single project structure, instead they can change it to how they wish.
Pro Can use Symfony components
Laravel uses many libraries built for the Symfony PHP framework. Many of these libraries are well-built and have been tested by users before. Since the point of using a web framework is to shorten development time and to avoid reinventing the wheel for problems that have already been solved, then it's logical for a framework to use libraries already built to solve problems that have already been solved.
Pro Extremely powerful template system
Laravel has a powerful template system called Blade. It's quite similar to Twig or Moustache with lots of curly braces but the real power comes from the usage of PHP code directly in the view. Blade templates compile directly to raw PHP and are processed in the server when a request is made.
Pro Gulp tasks in the form of Laravel Elixir
In Laravel 5.0 they added Laravel Elixir, which provides an API for using Gulp tasks for Laravel applications. Elixir supports several CSS preprocessors and even some test tools. But it's still in the early stages of development and it will be developed even further in the following releases. With more methods and more Gulp tasks supported.
Pro Great Ecosystem
Has a great Ecosystem with SAAS like: Forge, Envoyer, Nova & from 3rd parties like oh-dear
Pro Great Community
Cons
Con No single recommended way of doing something
Express considers itself to be a "minimalistic unopinionated framework", it basically lets the developer determine how their project will be organized. On one hand, this gives anyone terrific power and flexibility to use any library they want for a certain task and to organize their project structure however they want. But on the other hand, there's no single recommended way of organizing things, which can be a trap for beginners and experienced developers alike and result in unmaintainable projects.
Con Uses too much magic methods
It complicates debugging and autocompletion.
Con Bloated
While the speed doesn't seem to be an issue with it (on local tests), in production it may be hindered. The framework creates a ton of files and folders, some of which your app might not even use. Not good if you don't like having a ton of folders and rigid non-standard PHP folder structure for development.
Con Hard to use model properties
You need to check all model properties in database to know it exists, or declare all them manually.
Con Steep learning curve
While a lot of times you can write things in plain PHP, it will hinder you down the line when you want to use core features and find that you have to rewrite code which then causes issues throughout the app. Documentation is good, but you need to know what you are looking for and practical examples are non-existent. Many features have been updated throughout the versions in such a short time that tutorials you find online are confusing to sort through outdated tutorials and guides that no longer work or have been depreciated.
Con Poor performance
Con Follows bad design practices
Uses bad practices, like Singletons, Magic models, Middleware.
