Should I use Laravel or CodeIgniter for my project?

For new projects in 2026 we recommend Laravel in almost all cases. The ecosystem (Cashier, Sanctum, Horizon, Octane, Filament, Livewire, Inertia, Pulse, Telescope), the hiring pool, the community velocity, the documentation, and the security patch cadence all run significantly ahead of CodeIgniter. CodeIgniter 4 is technically capable but the gap has widened over the past five years. The only common scenarios where CodeIgniter still makes sense are extending an existing CodeIgniter codebase with a healthy team, or low complexity sites where the team is genuinely CodeIgniter native and switching costs outweigh ecosystem benefits.