Build what your business actually needs

Laravel shines for custom web apps in 2026 due to its rapid development ecosystem—built-in auth, ORM (Eloquent), queues, and testing tools let teams ship MVPs faster than Symfony's complexity or Node/Go's manual wiring. It balances simplicity for mid-sized projects with enterprise scalability via Octane/Vapor, while PHP's stability avoids Node's callback hell for CPU-bound tasks. Strong community packages and hosting (Forge, Vapor) reduce ops overhead compared to Go's verbosity.

Scale Laravel for 1M+ users by optimizing database first (indexing, read replicas, sharding), offloading heavy tasks to queues (Redis/SQS), and using Octane for in-memory speed. Add horizontal scaling with load balancers (NGINX/AWS ELB), CDN for assets, and auto-scaling infrastructure (Kubernetes/Vapor). This keeps costs low while handling traffic spikes without rewriting code.

Design REST APIs using resourceful routing (/api/v1/users), API Resources for consistent JSON (data/errors/pagination), and Form Requests for validation. Secure with Sanctum tokens, rate limiting, CORS; document via Scribe/Postman with examples. This ensures mobile/third-party clients integrate reliably without surprises.

For SaaS multi-tenancy, use packages like stancl/tenancy for subdomain isolation (company.app.com), with single DB + tenant_id scopes or separate DBs for strict isolation. Middleware auto-switches connections; monitor usage to enforce limits. Balances simplicity, security, and scale without custom hacks.

The cleanest pattern is Laravel as a JSON API backend and React/Vue/Next as separate frontends: use Laravel Sanctum/JWT for SPA auth, CORS correctly, and let Next handle routing/SEO while Laravel focuses on data and business rules. For tighter coupling, Inertia.js or Laravel + Blade for core pages with Vue/React islands gives good DX while still supporting SSR and SEO where needed.

Start with discovery and domain modeling (workflows, roles, core entities), then produce low‑fidelity wireframes and a high‑level architecture (modules, bounded contexts, integrations) before sprinting. Run 2‑week sprints with a thin vertical slice first (auth + one core flow), bake in testing and CI/CD from day one, and use feedback from staging/early users to drive a backlog of incremental feature rollouts and refactors, plus a clear maintenance/release calendar.