Laravel Homestead vs Nuclide: What are the differences?

Laravel Homestead: The official Laravel local development environment (Vagrant box). Laravel Homestead is an official, pre-packaged Vagrant "box" that provides you a wonderful development environment without requiring you to install PHP, HHVM, a web server, and any other server software on your local machine. Homestead runs on any Windows, Mac, or Linux system, and includes the Nginx web server, PHP 5.6, MySQL, Postgres, Redis, Memcached, and all of the other goodies you need to develop amazing Laravel applications; Nuclide: An open IDE for web and native mobile development, built on top of Atom (by Facebook). A unified developer experience for web and mobile development, built as a suite of packages on top of Atom to provide hackability and the support of an active community.

Laravel Homestead and Nuclide are primarily classified as "Virtual Machine" and "Integrated Development Environment" tools respectively.

Some of the features offered by Laravel Homestead are:

• Ubuntu 14.04
• PHP 5.6
• HHVM

On the other hand, Nuclide provides the following key features:

• Remote development. At Facebook, our web and back-end engineers work on remote development servers in our data centers. Nuclide provides a pair of packages that allow connections over SSH to a lightweight node daemon on the server, making possible remote file editing and syntax/type validation. Of course, this also works for VMs, enabling local development on HHVM, for example.
• Hack language support. The Hack codebase is one of the largest at Facebook. First-class Hack support — including syntax highlighting, type-checking, autocomplete, and click-to-symbol features — has been an important requirement on Nuclide from the start. We're also excited that the growing Hack community outside the company will be able to enjoy dedicated IDE support.
• Flow support. For both local and remote JavaScript development, Flow has brought type integrity and the ability to quickly refactor our React components and apps. As it does for Hack, Nuclide supports Flow-specific decorations and editor features in @flow-annotated files.

"Easy to setup" is the top reason why over 18 developers like Laravel Homestead, while over 7 developers mention "Remote development with SSH" as the leading cause for choosing Nuclide.

Laravel Homestead and Nuclide are both open source tools. Nuclide with 8K GitHub stars and 747 forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Laravel Homestead with 3.11K GitHub stars and 1.32K GitHub forks.

Balliza, Pitcherific, and Timekit are some of the popular companies that use Laravel Homestead, whereas Nuclide is used by Facebook, Instagram, and Movielala. Laravel Homestead has a broader approval, being mentioned in 20 company stacks & 24 developers stacks; compared to Nuclide, which is listed in 8 company stacks and 5 developer stacks.