Originally published on shipfastdev.com .

For most startup backends, both Laravel and Node.js will do the job; the better choice depends on your product and your team. Laravel gets a typical SaaS or marketplace backend (accounts, admin, payments, emails, background jobs) built fastest because those pieces ship with the framework. Node.js, usually with NestJS or Express, fits best when your team writes TypeScript everywhere, when the product is heavy on real-time connections, or when you want the largest hiring pool.

Here is how they compare on the four things a founder should care about: ecosystem, hiring, speed of building and hosting.

First, what you are comparing

Laravel is a PHP web framework. Its documentation lists "thorough dependency injection, an expressive database abstraction layer, queues and scheduled jobs, unit and integration testing" among its built-in features, and it can serve either full pages or an API for a separate frontend or mobile app.

Node.js is a runtime, not a framework.…