Can Laravel handle real time features?

Yes. Laravel ships first party real time support through Laravel Reverb (a first party WebSocket server), broadcasting, and Laravel Echo on the frontend. Reverb handles presence channels, private channels, and high connection counts. For most real time features (notifications, live updates, chat, presence indicators, collaborative cursors) Laravel Reverb is sufficient. The case for a dedicated Node.js real time service appears at extreme connection counts or where the real time layer needs to be independently scaled and deployed from the main application, which is a smaller set of products than people assume.