Laravel is a web application framework for PHP, made by Laravel and thousands of open-source contributors. A web framework gives an application a fixed structure and ready-made parts, so developers write the features of their product instead of the plumbing. Laravel has a convention for most common tasks: routing, queues, authentication and more.
A request arrives at a route, which calls a controller; the controller reads and writes the database through Eloquent, Laravel's ORM (a library that maps database tables to objects in the code), and returns a page built from Blade templates or JSON data for an API. Migrations describe database schema changes as code. Other built-in parts handle validation, file storage, background jobs in queues, scheduled tasks, caching with systems such as Redis, and unit and integration tests. Starter kits connect Laravel to React, Vue or Svelte front ends. The current major version is 13.x.
The framework is open-source software under the MIT license and is free to use. The same company also offers hosting (Laravel Cloud, billed by use) and monitoring (Nightwatch) as separate products.