When comparing Lumen vs ASP.NET Core, the Slant community recommends ASP.NET Core for most people. In the question“What are the best web frameworks to create a web REST API?” ASP.NET Core is ranked 9th while Lumen is ranked 10th. The most important reason people chose ASP.NET Core is:
Thanks to breakthroughs in ROSLYN compiler and the efforts of the .NET COre developer team, code written in C# can reach speeds just a step behind C++.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Easily upgradable to Laravel
Since it's basically just a minimal version of Laravel, it can be upgraded to a full Laravel app if the need arises. No need for code changes, just import the code to a new Laravel install.
Pro Feature rich
Pro Highest performing PHP micro-Framework
Lumen is benchmarked at 100/rps (Requests Per Second) faster than Slim v3, which used to be considered the fastest and most performant micro-Framework to date with the ability to handle 1800/rps. (1900/rps vs 1800/rps respectively).
Pro Easy to use
Pro Fast and getting faster
Thanks to breakthroughs in ROSLYN compiler and the efforts of the .NET COre developer team, code written in C# can reach speeds just a step behind C++.
Pro Multi platform
Can run on Windows, Linux and Mac (also Visual Studio Code editor).
Pro JSON optimization
In .NET Core 2.1 and 3.0, new APIs are added that make it possible to write JSON APIs that require less memory, using Span<T> and UTF8 strings, and improve throughput of applications like Kestrel, ASP.NET Core web server. See also Utf8JsonReader.
Pro Tutorials and documentation quality
Both microsoft and 3rd party tutorials are mostly of high quality and encourage you to use the industry best-practices.
Pro Built-in middleware
Built-in middleware featuring: Authentication, Cookie policy, Health Check, MVC, Session etc.
Pro Hosting
Ability to host on IIS, Nginx, Apache, Docker, or self-host in your own process.
Pro Ease of Use
Pro Security
It is a very secure platform.
Pro Tooling
Both VS and VSCode are powerful free IDEs that are well integrated with ASP.net Core. VS Community also allows for commercial use for projects with less than 5 developers.
Cons
Con Built for smaller tasks like APIs
Con It's based off Laravel and inherits its shortcomings
Lumen inherits many shortcomings of Laravel, such as static proxy classes.
Con Made to work alongside Laravel
Lumen as a framework is at it's full potential when used alongside it's older brother. Lumen was created to be used for microservices alongside Laravel, which is used for more user-facing applications. If a project is already using another framework other than Laravel, it would be better to use another microframework for microservices instead of Lumen.