Originally published at hafiz.dev

Every SaaS reaches a point where "who changed that?" stops being a casual question and starts being a support ticket. A team member deletes a project. A setting gets changed and nobody knows when. A user loses access and blames an admin. Without an audit log, you're guessing. And in enterprise deals, the absence of audit logging can be an actual blocker.

spatie/laravel-activitylog has been the go-to solution for this in the Laravel ecosystem for years, with over 48 million Packagist installs. Version 5 shipped in late March 2026, and it's a meaningful upgrade: PHP 8.4+, a cleaner API, a new database schema, and properly swappable internals.…