Laravel vs Spring Boot for Solo Developers

Quick Comparison

Laravel Overview

Laravel is PHP's crown jewel. Eloquent ORM, built-in authentication, migrations, queues, scheduling, caching, mail, notifications, and an admin panel ecosystem (Filament, Nova) that lets you manage data without building custom UI. The Artisan CLI generates boilerplate. The documentation reads like a tutorial. Everything feels cohesive and designed to work together.

What consistently impresses me about Laravel is how fast you can go from idea to deployed product. I've started projects where I had user registration, email verification, password reset, and an admin dashboard working within a couple of hours. Not days. Hours. For a solo developer, that's the difference between maintaining momentum and getting bogged down in infrastructure.

Laravel Forge makes deployment almost trivially easy too. Point it at your server, connect your repo, and it handles PHP, Nginx, SSL, databases, and automatic deployments. No Dockerfiles, no Kubernetes, no infrastructure-as-code.

Spring Boot Overview

Spring Boot simplifies the Spring Framework with auto-configuration, embedded servers, and opinionated defaults. It's the standard for enterprise Java development. Spring Security, Spring Data JPA, Spring Cloud, Spring Batch. There's a Spring project for virtually every enterprise need.

I respect Spring Boot's capabilities. If you need distributed transactions, CQRS, event sourcing, complex security policies, or microservice choreography, Spring's ecosystem has battle-tested solutions. Major banks, insurance companies, and Fortune 500 companies run on Spring Boot. The tooling in IntelliJ IDEA is arguably the best IDE experience available in any language.

But the developer experience for solo projects is rough. A simple REST endpoint requires creating an entity class, a repository interface, a service class, a controller class, and DTOs. That's 5 files for "save some data." The annotation soup gets dense. And JVM startup time (5-15 seconds) plus baseline memory usage (200-500MB) adds friction during development.

Key Differences

Development velocity is night and day. Laravel gets you to a working feature faster. Less boilerplate, less ceremony, fewer files per feature. Spring Boot's architecture pays off at team scale, where clear boundaries prevent chaos. For one person, those boundaries are just more code to write.

Memory and hosting costs. A Laravel application runs comfortably on a $5/month VPS. Spring Boot needs at least 512MB of RAM just for the JVM, often more. When you're watching expenses as a solo developer, server costs matter.

Admin panel. Laravel has Filament and Nova for auto-generated admin interfaces. Spring Boot has... nothing comparable. You'll build admin functionality with custom controllers or use a generic admin tool. For solo developers who need to manage data, debug user issues, and monitor their app, Laravel's admin ecosystem is a massive advantage.

Ecosystem maturity. Both are extremely mature. Spring has been around since 2003, Laravel since 2011. Both have vast communities, extensive documentation, and solutions for every common problem. Spring's ecosystem is deeper for enterprise concerns. Laravel's ecosystem is broader for web application concerns.

Deployment complexity. Laravel with Forge is point-and-click deployment. Spring Boot typically requires Docker, a container registry, and some form of orchestration. You can deploy a Spring Boot JAR directly, but in practice most teams containerize it.

Language learning. PHP is quick to pick up, especially for web development. Java has a steeper curve with its type system, class hierarchy, and verbose syntax. Modern Java (17+) and Kotlin are much nicer than legacy Java, but there's still more language overhead.

When to Choose Laravel

• You want to ship a complete web application as quickly as possible
• Admin panel and user management are core needs
• You're a solo developer who values productivity over architecture
• You want simple, affordable hosting without worrying about JVM memory
• Background jobs, scheduling, and notifications are needed

When to Choose Spring Boot

• You're an experienced Java/Kotlin developer and it's your most productive language
• The project has genuine enterprise requirements (distributed transactions, complex security)
• You're building for a domain where Java dominates (banking, insurance, large-scale enterprise)
• Long-term team scalability is more important than solo development speed
• You need the specific capabilities of a Spring project (Spring Security ACL, Spring Batch)

The Verdict

For solo developers, Laravel wins this comparison by a wide margin. The productivity difference is not subtle. A feature that takes an afternoon in Laravel takes a full day in Spring Boot, and most of that extra time goes toward boilerplate that doesn't add business value.

Spring Boot is an excellent framework for the right context. Enterprise teams, complex security requirements, domain-driven design at scale. But solo developers rarely have those needs. What solo developers need is speed, simplicity, and built-in tooling that lets one person do the work of three.

If you're a Java developer considering Spring Boot for a solo project, I'd genuinely encourage you to try Laravel for a weekend. The productivity gap might change your perspective on what's possible for one person building alone.