Laravel vs Go Gin for Solo Developers

Quick Comparison

Laravel Overview

Laravel gives you everything. ORM, migrations, authentication scaffolding, job queues, task scheduling, mail, notifications, caching, and the best admin panel ecosystem in any framework (Filament is genuinely impressive). You run a few Artisan commands and you have a working application with user registration, email verification, and database management.

I keep coming back to Laravel for projects where time-to-market matters. When you're solo, every hour counts. Laravel's convention-over-configuration approach means you spend less time debating folder structures and more time writing business logic. The documentation is phenomenal, and the community has solved nearly every common problem already.

Modern PHP is also much better than its reputation suggests. PHP 8.x has named arguments, match expressions, union types, and enums. It's not the PHP from 2010 that people joke about.

Go Gin Overview

Gin is Go's most popular HTTP framework. It gives you routing, middleware, JSON serialization, and parameter binding. That's essentially it, and Go developers prefer it that way. The Go philosophy is explicit code over magic, and Gin follows that principle.

When I first built an API with Go and Gin, two things hit me immediately. First, the compiled binary is a single file with zero dependencies. No package manager, no runtime to install, no node_modules folder. Just copy the binary to a server and run it. Second, the performance is in a completely different league. A Gin API handles concurrent requests like they're nothing because Go's goroutines make concurrency trivial.

The learning curve is real though. Go is a different language with different idioms. Error handling is verbose. There's no inheritance, no generics (well, there are now, but they're limited). You write more code for the same functionality compared to Laravel. But that code tends to be explicit, testable, and fast.

Key Differences

Productivity vs. performance. This is the fundamental trade-off. Laravel gets you to a working product faster. Go Gin gives you a faster product once it's built. For most solo developer projects, time-to-market is more important than microsecond response times. But there are legitimate cases where performance matters from day one.

Built-in functionality. Laravel includes an ORM, admin panel, auth, queues, mail, and more. Gin gives you HTTP routing. Everything else, you build or import yourself. For a Go API, you'll pick a database library (sqlx or GORM), a migration tool (golang-migrate), an auth library, and wire it all together manually.

Admin panel story. This is where Laravel dominates. Filament generates full admin interfaces from your models. In Go, there's no equivalent. You either build an admin UI from scratch, use a generic tool like AdminBro, or manage data through SQL directly. For solo developers who need to manage content and users, this gap is significant.

Deployment simplicity. Gin compiles to a single binary. No PHP-FPM, no web server configuration, no runtime dependencies. But Laravel has Forge, which automates deployment, SSL, database setup, and server management. Both have their version of "simple deployment," just different kinds.

Concurrency. Go handles concurrent operations natively with goroutines. Laravel relies on queues and workers for background processing, which works but requires Redis and a queue worker process. If your application needs to handle thousands of simultaneous connections (like a real-time API or WebSocket server), Go has a natural advantage.

Error handling. Go's explicit error handling (the if err != nil pattern) is verbose but thorough. Laravel uses exceptions, try/catch, and middleware error handlers. Go forces you to handle every error. Laravel lets you be lazy about it, which is both a feature and a risk.

When to Choose Laravel

• You need to ship a full web application quickly
• Admin panel, auth, and user management are core requirements
• You're building a content-heavy or form-heavy application
• Background jobs and scheduled tasks are part of the product
• You value developer productivity over raw performance

When to Choose Go Gin

• Performance and efficient resource usage are actual requirements (not theoretical)
• You're building an API or microservice that needs to handle high concurrency
• You want a single binary deployment with no runtime dependencies
• You already know Go or are motivated to learn it
• Your application is primarily an API, not a full web application

The Verdict

For the vast majority of solo developer projects, Laravel is the better choice. It gets you to a working product faster, includes everything you need, and the productivity advantage is massive when you're building alone. The admin panel ecosystem alone saves days of development.

Go Gin is the right choice when your project's core challenge is performance or concurrency. If you're building a real-time data pipeline, a high-throughput API proxy, or a service that needs to handle 10,000 concurrent connections, Go's runtime model gives you capabilities that PHP can't match without significant infrastructure.

But here's the honest advice: if you're asking "should I use Go?" the answer is probably no. Solo developers who genuinely need Go's performance characteristics usually already know they need Go. If you're in doubt, start with Laravel, ship your product, and migrate specific services to Go later if performance actually becomes a bottleneck. Premature optimization is the real enemy of solo developer projects.