Laravel 5 vs FeathersJS

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.

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.

Laravel's documentation is thorough and very good. It covers everything and is very helpful to experienced and new users alike.

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.

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.

Laravel comes with Authentication capabilities and a fully-powered Auth class out of the box. For passwords it uses bcrypt.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Has a great Ecosystem with SAAS like: Forge, Envoyer, Nova & from 3rd parties like oh-dear

Feather can sync events happening in two different Node processes or even servers in real-time. For example: an event happens in server A, the user connected to server B is instantly notified of that event.

This is done through a central Redis or Mongo collection or through a websocket libraries' clustering library.

Through services, Feathers provides instant CRUD functionality, it also can easily expose a RESTful and real-time API through HTTP/HTTPS and websockets.

Since Feathers itself is built on top of Express (it's a thin wrapper over socket.io, primus and Express) and because of Feathers' highly modular nature, it's very easy to integrate Feathers in an existing Express project.

Feathers makes extensive use of modules (which are called Feathers services). These services work like ExpressJS middleware and can be used with app.use('/path', serviceObject).

Services help developers keep their applications modular and as minimal as possible, without any unnecessary libraries or bloat.

FeatherJS uses primus which is a universal wrapper for real-time frameworks. Through primus you can easily choose which socket transport you want to use.