StackShareStackShare
Follow on
StackShare

Discover and share technology stacks from companies around the world.

Follow on

© 2025 StackShare. All rights reserved.

Product

  • Stacks
  • Tools
  • Feed

Company

  • About
  • Contact

Legal

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Frameworks
  4. Frameworks
  5. Laravel vs Play

Laravel vs Play

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Laravel
Laravel
Stacks28.7K
Followers23.8K
Votes3.9K
GitHub Stars82.6K
Forks24.6K
Play
Play
Stacks752
Followers609
Votes496
GitHub Stars12.6K
Forks4.1K

Laravel vs Play: What are the differences?

  1. Template Engine: One key difference between Laravel and Play is their template engines. Laravel uses Blade templating engine, which is a powerful engine with various features like template inheritance and sections, making it easier to work with UI design. On the other hand, Play uses Twirl, a type-safe template engine that integrates seamlessly with Scala code.

  2. Language: Another significant difference is the programming language used in each framework. Laravel is based on PHP, which is widely popular for web development, while Play is based on Scala, a functional and object-oriented language that provides powerful concurrency features.

  3. ORM Support: Laravel comes with Eloquent ORM, which is an elegant and simple ActiveRecord implementation. It provides an easy way to interact with the database using models. In contrast, Play supports various ORM tools like Slick and Anorm, offering flexibility to developers in choosing the right tool based on their project requirements.

  4. Community and Ecosystem: Laravel has a large and active community, resulting in extensive documentation, plugins, and resources available for developers. Play, on the other hand, has a smaller community compared to Laravel, but it is known for its strong integration with the Akka toolkit, which offers powerful actor-based concurrency support.

  5. Request Handling: In Laravel, routing is done using simple and expressive methods that make it easy to define routes and handle HTTP requests. Play, on the other hand, follows a more functional approach with its routing DSL that allows for concise and flexible route definitions, making it suitable for complex application requirements.

  6. Testing: Laravel provides built-in support for testing with PHPUnit, making it easier for developers to write unit tests and ensure code quality. Play also offers robust testing support with tools like Specs2 and ScalaTest, allowing developers to write comprehensive tests for their applications.

In Summary, the key differences between Laravel and Play lie in their template engines, programming languages, ORM support, community size, request handling, and testing capabilities.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs
CLI (Node.js)
or
Manual

Advice on Laravel, Play

Eva
Eva

Fullstack developer

Jul 28, 2020

Needs adviceonJavaJavaSpring BootSpring BootJavaScriptJavaScript

Hello, I am a fullstack web developer. I have been working for a company with Java/ Spring Boot and client-side JavaScript(mainly jQuery, some AngularJS) for the past 4 years. As I wish to now work as a freelancer, I am faced with a dilemma: which stack to choose given my current knowledge and the state of the market?

I've heard PHP is very popular in the freelance world. I don't know PHP. However, I'm sure it wouldn't be difficult to learn since it has many similarities with Java (OOP). It seems to me that Laravel has similarities with Spring Boot (it's MVC and OOP). Also, people say Laravel works well with Vue.js, which is my favorite JS framework.

On the other hand, I already know the Javascript language, and I like Vue.js, so I figure I could go the fullstack Javascript route with ExpressJS. However, I am not sure if these techs are ripe for freelancing (with regards to RAD, stability, reliability, security, costs, etc.) Is it true that Express is almost always used with MongoDB? Because my experience is mostly with SQL databases.

The projects I would like to work on are custom web applications/websites for small businesses. I have developed custom ERPs before and found that Java was a good fit, except for it taking a long time to develop. I cannot make a choice, and I am constantly switching between trying PHP and Node.js/Express. Any real-world advice would be welcome! I would love to find a stack that I enjoy while doing meaningful freelance coding.

826k views826k
Comments
washie
washie

Developer at Bytecom

Jun 14, 2020

Decided

i find python quite resourceful. given the bulk of libraries that python has and the trends of the tech i find django which runs on python to be the framework of choice to the upcoming web services and application. Laravel on the other hand which is powered by PHP is also quite resourceful and great for startups and common web applications.

758k views758k
Comments
Mohammad
Mohammad

Oct 28, 2019

Needs adviceonNode.jsNode.jsLaravelLaravelPHPPHP

I want to create a video sharing service like Youtube, which users can use to upload and watch videos. I prefer to use Vue.js for front-end. What do you suggest for the back-end? @{Node.js}|tool:1011| or @{Laravel}|tool:992| ( @{PHP}|tool:991| ) I need a good performance with high speed, and the most important thing is the ability to handle user's requests if the site's traffic increases. I want to create an algorithm that users who watch others videos earn points (randomly but in clear context) If you have anything else to improve, please let me know. For eg: If you prefer React to Vue.js. Thanks in advance

309k views309k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Laravel
Laravel
Play
Play

It is a web application framework with expressive, elegant syntax. It attempts to take the pain out of development by easing common tasks used in the majority of web projects, such as authentication, routing, sessions, and caching.

Play Framework makes it easy to build web applications with Java & Scala. Play is based on a lightweight, stateless, web-friendly architecture. Built on Akka, Play provides predictable and minimal resource consumption (CPU, memory, threads) for highly-scalable applications.

Template Engine; MVC Architecture Support; Eloquent ORM (Object Relational Mapping); Security; Artisan; Libraries & Modular; Database Migration System; Unit-Testing
-
Statistics
GitHub Stars
82.6K
GitHub Stars
12.6K
GitHub Forks
24.6K
GitHub Forks
4.1K
Stacks
28.7K
Stacks
752
Followers
23.8K
Followers
609
Votes
3.9K
Votes
496
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 556
    Clean architecture
  • 393
    Growing community
  • 371
    Composer friendly
  • 345
    Open source
  • 326
    The only framework to consider for php
Cons
  • 54
    PHP
  • 33
    Too many dependency
  • 23
    Slower than the other two
  • 17
    A lot of static method calls for convenience
  • 15
    Too many include
Pros
  • 81
    Scala
  • 55
    Web-friendly architecture
  • 55
    Built on akka
  • 50
    Stateless
  • 47
    High-scalable
Cons
  • 3
    Evolves fast, keep up with releases
  • 1
    Unnecessarily complicated
Integrations
PHP
PHP
Django
Django
CodeIgniter
CodeIgniter
CakePHP
CakePHP
No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Laravel, Play?

Node.js

Node.js

Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices.

Rails

Rails

Rails is a web-application framework that includes everything needed to create database-backed web applications according to the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern.

Django

Django

Django is a high-level Python Web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design.

.NET

.NET

.NET is a general purpose development platform. With .NET, you can use multiple languages, editors, and libraries to build native applications for web, mobile, desktop, gaming, and IoT for Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and more.

ASP.NET Core

ASP.NET Core

A free and open-source web framework, and higher performance than ASP.NET, developed by Microsoft and the community. It is a modular framework that runs on both the full .NET Framework, on Windows, and the cross-platform .NET Core.

Symfony

Symfony

It is written with speed and flexibility in mind. It allows developers to build better and easy to maintain websites with PHP..

Spring

Spring

A key element of Spring is infrastructural support at the application level: Spring focuses on the "plumbing" of enterprise applications so that teams can focus on application-level business logic, without unnecessary ties to specific deployment environments.

Spring Boot

Spring Boot

Spring Boot makes it easy to create stand-alone, production-grade Spring based Applications that you can "just run". We take an opinionated view of the Spring platform and third-party libraries so you can get started with minimum fuss. Most Spring Boot applications need very little Spring configuration.

Android SDK

Android SDK

Android provides a rich application framework that allows you to build innovative apps and games for mobile devices in a Java language environment.

Phoenix Framework

Phoenix Framework

Phoenix is a framework for building HTML5 apps, API backends and distributed systems. Written in Elixir, you get beautiful syntax, productive tooling and a fast runtime.

Related Comparisons

Bootstrap
Materialize

Bootstrap vs Materialize

Laravel
Django

Django vs Laravel vs Node.js

Bootstrap
Foundation

Bootstrap vs Foundation vs Material UI

Node.js
Spring Boot

Node.js vs Spring-Boot

Liquibase
Flyway

Flyway vs Liquibase