Switching Your Tech Stack (Rails to Laravel). Worth it?

Switching tech stacks. Is it worth the “switching cost”?

I’m finding out this month.

For the past 7 years, I’ve been developing software products using Ruby on Rails. I still love it and use it daily!

But this month, I’m carving out some time to explore and learn Laravel. More specifically, the “TALL” stack: TailwindCSS, AlpineJS, Laravel, and Livewire.

I’m already well versed in Tailwind (love it!) and I’ve been using AlpineJS a bit lately too (always a fan of lightweight Javascript interactivity). Laravel and Livewire—and PHP in general—still somewhat new territory for me (Well, not entirely. I spent a decade building in WordPress, which is also PHP-based).

Comparing and contrasting Rails vs. Laravel is a (technical) topic for another day. Today I’m thinking about the business question: Is learning and switching stacks worth the investment?

Like so many things in business, “It depends”. Here’s what this one depends on:

If my goal is to build and ship one new app, then my answer is no. Choosing an unfamiliar stack will slow me down, delay my launch. It won’t serve my goal.

Good thing that’s not my goal.

If my goal is to build many apps in the coming months and years—as it is with my new product studio, Instrumental Products—then I think it’s worth it to take a minute (ok, a month) to vet the question of which stack is best to build this business on?

Here’s what’s most important:

• Is it the right tool for the job? Can we build a modern, high-quality web application using this stack?

• Can we ship fast? Getting a new product in the hands of first customers as fast as possible is critical.

• Are there abundant resources? Component libraries, training, developer communities, hiring pools.

• Can we streamline our workflow? Re-useable templates, speed to spin up new apps, easy to maintain, etc.

The truth? Both Rails and Laravel can check all of those boxes. I’m still fast and effective with Rails and it’s still my default go-to stack for new projects today.

But in this moment, I sense there’s a shift in momentum in Laravel-land, maybe more-so than in Rails-land. The resources, community, and integration of these in Laravel seems to be reaching a level of maturity now that makes it worth taking a fresh look to see what I might be missing (I’ll admit to a little FOMO).

So I’m willing to spend a month—but not much more—taking a close look at the question of whether my product studio should be exclusively Rails-based, or a Rails/Laravel hybrid, or perhaps move toward a Laravel (and TALL stack)-focused shop.

I’ll share more as I learn more :)