20 Best Laravel Packages To Use in 2023/

Laravel, an epitome of excellence in the PHP universe, continues to provide an unparalleled experience for developers. Its expansive ecosystem of packages is the fruit of the framework’s flexibility and the vibrant community that surrounds it. This guide elaborates on 20 exceptional Laravel packages that are expected to reign in 2023.

Why Use Laravel?

Rich Features Right Out of the Box: Laravel ships with a plethora of built-in tools, from the powerful Eloquent ORM for database interactions to Blade, its intuitive templating engine. These tools streamline many of the common tasks involved in web development, offering developers a head start in crafting applications.

Security Emphasis: Web application security is non-negotiable, and Laravel places a significant emphasis on this. From hashing algorithms to built-in methods to prevent CSRF, SQL injection, and XSS attacks, Laravel ensures developers have the tools to build secure applications.

Extensive Learning Resources: Laravel’s documentation is extensive, clear, and practical, making it easier for both newcomers and experienced developers. Couple this with Laracasts, a dedicated platform offering screencasts on Laravel and related technologies, and you’ve got a well-rounded educational resource.

Vibrant Community and Ecosystem: Laravel’s community is thriving. With frequent meetups, global conferences, and an active online community, developers can always seek guidance, share knowledge, and collaborate on projects. The expansive ecosystem, including tools like Forge, Vapor, and Nova, ensures Laravel can adapt to diverse project requirements.

Future-Ready: With the web’s ever-evolving landscape, frameworks need to adapt quickly. Laravel consistently demonstrates its ability to evolve, ensuring developers always have a modern toolkit at their disposal.

List of 20 Best Laravel Packages for Developers

1. Laravel Debugbar:

A comprehensive developer toolbar embedded directly into Laravel applications.

• Real-time Metrics: Provides developers with real-time data about what’s happening under the hood, from executed queries, and rendered views to route matches.
• Extendable Panels: Developers can add custom panels, tailoring the Debugbar to display information pertinent to the specific application.
• Integration with Other Tools: Debugbar isn’t an isolated tool. It can capture queries from popular libraries, like Eloquent and Doctrine, offering deeper insights.

2. Laravel Horizon:

Horizon, tailored for Laravel Redis queues, provides a full-fledged dashboard with a spectrum of real-time data.

• Multiple Queue Handling: Manage, monitor, and balance multiple queues to ensure even distribution of jobs and optimal performance.
• Notifications: Set up notifications for essential events, ensuring immediate updates when a queue fails or when a job remains unprocessed for an unusually long time.
• Performance Metrics: Horizon provides historical data on job runtimes and failures, aiding in performance tuning and ensuring smooth operations.

3. Laravel Telescope:

An exquisite debugging assistant for Laravel, Telescope offers an in-depth view of the core mechanics of your application.

• Entry Recording: From requests, exceptions, and logs, to database queries, Telescope records all, making it an indispensable tool during debugging sessions.
• Batch Processing Monitoring: Gain insights into how batch processes are handled, the time they take, and any issues they might encounter.
• Mail Previews: Before any emails are sent out, preview them in Telescope to ensure they appear as intended.

4. Laravel Passport:

A complete OAuth2 server implementation tailored for Laravel, ensuring secure API authentication.

• Personal Access Tokens: Grant users personal tokens, allowing them direct access without going through the entire OAuth2 authentication flow.
• Password Grant Tokens: Ideal for third-party apps, enabling them to access APIs securely.
• Enhanced Security: Beyond token issuance, Passport provides token scoping, limiting what specific tokens can and cannot do.

5. Laravel Socialite:

An eloquent and efficient solution for OAuth authentication across a myriad of service providers.

• Unified API for Multiple Providers: Whether it’s Google, Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, Socialite provides a unified interface, abstracting the differences between various OAuth providers.
• Easy Configuration: Most of the heavy lifting is abstracted, requiring developers to merely configure client IDs, secrets, and callbacks.
• Extensible to New Providers: While Socialite supports a broad range of providers, it’s also built for extensibility, allowing integration with any OAuth1/OAuth2 provider.

6. Laravel Nova:

A meticulously crafted admin panel for Laravel, ensuring optimal management of application data.

• Custom Tools: Developers can build custom tools, tailored for specific needs, ensuring Nova fits into any application structure.
• Actions: Define actions that can be run against resources, allowing for bulk updates or specific operations.
• Lenses: These are custom views that can be set up for resources, offering a tailored perspective, especially useful for large datasets.

7. Laravel Echo:

Echo is Laravel’s tool for making web applications in real-time, leveraging web sockets.

• Real-time Data: With Echo, it becomes seamless to broadcast server-side changes to the client, enhancing user experience with real-time feedback.
• Multiple Broadcasting Drivers: Whether using Pusher, Redis, or Socket.io, Echo supports various broadcasting drivers, allowing flexibility in infrastructure.
• Channels: Echo supports public, private, and presence channels, catering to a variety of real-time communication scenarios.

8. Laravel Sanctum:

A modern package to handle API authentication, ensuring security with simplicity.

• Mobile Application Authentication: Sanctum caters to the growing mobile app space, ensuring API calls between mobile applications and Laravel are secured.
• Token Abilities: Define clear abilities for API tokens, ensuring granular access control and minimizing potential security risks.

9. Laravel Medialibrary:

A flexible media library offering functionalities like file uploading, media conversions, and more.

• Responsive Images: Medialibrary can generate responsive image sets, ensuring optimal load times across devices.
• File System Abstraction: Use Laravel’s filesystem abstraction to store media on various platforms, be it local storage or cloud platforms like S3.
• Media Manipulation: It’s not just about storing media. Convert, optimize, and even queue transformations for better performance.

10. Laravel Dusk:

Dusk offers browser testing for Laravel applications, ensuring applications look and work as intended across web browsers.

• Chromium-based Testing: Using a real Chromium instance, Dusk ensures realistic browser interactions for testing.
• Continuous Integration: Seamlessly integrate Dusk into your CI pipeline, making automated testing a standard part of your deployment process.
• Screenshots & Logging: On failures, Dusk can capture screenshots and console logs, providing insights into what went wrong.

11. Laravel Tinker:

A REPL for Laravel, Tinker offers direct command-line interaction with your Laravel application.

• Rapid Prototyping: Test new code snippets or functions directly without formal route or view setups.
• Database Exploration: Dive deep into Eloquent models, fetching, and manipulating records on the go.
• Extended with Tinkerwell: Tinkerwell, a third-party tool, supercharges Tinker, providing a UI-based interaction platform for your Laravel code.

12. Laravel Mix:

Asset compilation simplified, wrapping around Webpack to offer a fluent API for asset building.

• Pre-processors Support: Whether you’re using SASS, LESS, or Stylus, Mix ensures seamless integration and compilation.
• Versioning & Caching: Avoid browser caching issues with Mix’s versioning features.
• JavaScript Framework Integration: Whether you’re using React, Vue, or plain JavaScript, Mix handles bundling and transpilation with ease.

13. Laravel Scout:

Full-text search on steroids for Eloquent models, Scout is a search made easy.

• Pluggable Engines: While Algolia is the default, Scout is driver-based, meaning integration with other search platforms is possible.
• Zero Configuration Search: With just a trait on an Eloquent model, Scout makes it searchable.
• Custom Indexing: Fine-tune what data gets indexed and how it’s stored, ensuring optimal search results.

14. Laravel Cashier:

Subscription billing and payments are made easy, by integrating platforms like Stripe and Paddle.

• Recurring Billing: Set up monthly, yearly, or custom-duration billing cycles with ease.
• Invoice Generation: Automatically generate and mail detailed invoices to customers.
• Subscription Management: Handle plan upgrades, downgrades, coupon applications, and more with a fluid API.

15. Laravel Jetstream:

A robust application scaffolding solution, offering features like login, registration, email verification, and more.

• Livewire & Inertia Integration: Choose between two modern stacks, ensuring flexibility in front-end development.
• Teams Management: Jetstream supports team creation, invitations, roles, and permissions out of the box.
• Profile Photo & API Token Handling: Beyond authentication, Jetstream also offers features like profile photo management and API token creation.

16. Laravel Backpack:

Create custom admin panels in record time, ensuring efficient application management.:

• CrudPanel: An API that allows developers to define what happens in CRUD operations, ensuring flexibility.
• Custom Fields & Filters: Define fields unique to your application and set up filters for efficient data retrieval.
• Modular: Backpack promotes creating custom add-ons or using community-contributed ones, enhancing its capabilities.

17. Laravel Excel:

A sophisticated importer and exporter of Excel and CSV files.

• Fast Imports: By chunking results, Laravel Excel efficiently handles large imports without memory issues.
• Export Customization: Modify the export on the go, applying concerns or even queuing it for background processing.
• Advanced Formatting: Control row heights, column widths, font settings, and more.

18. Laravel Breeze:

A minimalistic yet effective application scaffolding solution.

• Tailwind Integration: Leverage the power of Tailwind CSS for frontend styling without additional setup.
• Clean & Simple: Breeze sticks to the essentials, offering only authentication and a simple dashboard.
• Rapid Prototyping: For projects that require a quick start without much overhead, Breeze is a perfect choice.

19. Laravel Ziggy:

Bridge the gap between your Laravel routes and JavaScript, ensuring frontend and backend cohesion.

• Named Routes in JS: Access Laravel named routes directly in JavaScript, making AJAX requests cleaner.
• Dynamic URL Generation: Even parameterized routes can be dynamically generated in JavaScript.
• Blade Integration: With the @routes directive, export routes directly to your Blade views.

20. Laravel Event Projector:

Laravel’s solution for implementing event sourcing, and handling the storage, projection, and replaying of events.

• Storing Events: Save domain events in an event store, allowing for the easy reconstruction of the state of an aggregate at any point in time.
• Projection: Define projectors that project event data to application read models.
• Event Replay: In case of structural changes in projectors, events can be replayed to update the read models.

Conclusion

One of Laravel’s standout features is its eloquently crafted syntax. This design, rooted in simplicity, ensures that developers can expressively articulate their code. It’s not just about the aesthetics; Laravel’s syntax facilitates a more readable, maintainable, and scalable codebase. Combined with its rich repertoire of out-of-the-box features, from robust database operations with Eloquent ORM to seamless task scheduling, Laravel truly transforms web development into art, making it as luxurious as it is efficient.

The core of Laravel, as formidable as it is, is further augmented by its expansive ecosystem of packages. The packages highlighted in this guide, alongside countless others gracing the Laravel ecosystem, serve as a testament to the framework’s flexibility and its open embrace of community contributions. These packages layer on added dimensions of versatility and efficiency, ensuring Laravel applications aren’t just about raw performance. They also emphasize best practices, code maintainability, scalability, and future readiness. It’s this holistic approach that ensures applications built on Laravel stand the test of time, adapting as the technological landscape evolves.

For developers navigating the tumultuous waters of the current tech era, marked by rapid shifts and technological evolutions, tools like Laravel act as guiding stars. They provide the stability, features, and performance required to keep pace with changing demands and expectations. As we transition into 2023, with an even broader toolkit and refined packages at our beck and call, Laravel’s position seems unassailable. It’s poised to not only continue its reign as a premier web development framework but also to redefine standards, challenging and inspiring other frameworks to elevate their offerings.

Envisioning the future of web development, it’s impossible to ignore the colossal impact Laravel is slated to have. It’s not just about building web applications; it’s about crafting digital experiences that resonate, engage, and deliver. With Laravel steering the ship, the horizon for web development isn’t just bright; it’s dazzling, promising a journey that’s as rewarding as the destination.

To stay informed about the latest developments in Laravel, visit slashdev.io. Our platform offers valuable insights, tutorials, and resources to help you make informed decisions in your web development journey.