When comparing Bootstrap vs Laravel 5, the Slant community recommends Laravel 5 for most people. In the question“What are the best web design tools?” Laravel 5 is ranked 10th while Bootstrap is ranked 12th. The most important reason people chose Laravel 5 is:
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.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Consistency across browsers
The grid layout with the predefined CSS elements and JavaScript components make it easier to have consistency across different browser versions and even different devices.
Pro Responsive design philosophy
Bootstrap is developed to be instantly compatible with all sizes of screens, so you don't have to worry about which device the user is accessing your site from. Yet if you prefer, you can disable responsiveness of Bootstrap.
Pro Well documented
Documentation is thorough, well organized and full of live examples and templates ready for use. Every component and every part of the framework is explained and covered in depth.
Pro Custom builds
If you don't want to download the full Bootstrap framework. Custom builds of Bootstrap can be created, including only the desired CSS, CSS components, and JavaScript components. This can be done directly from the Bootstrap website by simply choosing what components to download.
Pro Designed to get a site running quickly
Bootstrap is designed to get a site up and running quickly. Each of it's components is pre-configured to help with getting a site up and running quickly.
Pro Great community
Bootstrap is very popular and has a large community. As a result of this it is much easier to find help with anything you might need. This also gives you a treasure trove of prebuilt components to use and add to your site.
Pro Supports responsive embeds
Allows easily adding responsiveness to <iframe>
, <embed>
, and <object>
elements.
Pro Easily make professional looking websites
Bootstrap makes it easy to learn how to make professional looking websites. It can even make code junkies semi-enjoy design.
Pro Customizable
Bootstrap can be customized in a variety of ways. Either by overriding the default CSS styles with new CSS styles or by editing the .scss
Bootstrap files.
Pro A wide variety of themes available
To help you avoid the "Bootstrap look", there are many resources that provide a great selection of themes and templates for Bootstrap.
Pro One of the most popular ones
Ranked on GitHub as the most starred CSS repository.
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 Large file size out of the box
Bootstrap has an out-of-the box filesize of ~276K, which is pretty large considering it's just CSS. Most of those styles aren't even used in 90% of web pages built with Bootstrap. By only including the required styles it can be trimmed by 70%-75%.
Con Too many classes
Bootstrap's over-reliance on HTML classes for styling can get very messy very quickly. There's also an overabundance of DOM elements which have a lot of classes and are more often than not nested inside DOM elements with even more classes. This gets problematic down the line because the maintainability of the project gets harder when the project starts to get large.
Con Websites can start to look the same
If the initial Bootstrap colors and styles are not changed or edited, different websites start looking the same even if they have nothing to do with each other and they are made by different developers.
Con Hard to customise
It's quite hard to customise Bootstrap using pre-processors like SASS and LESS, the only real flexibility is with typography and colours.
Con Large font sizes
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.