As someone who spent years developing with PHP, I can confidently say that PHP used to be genuinely powerful. However, at this point, I wouldn’t call PHP “useless” I would say it is no longer a strategic technology.
Today, Laravel and WordPress act as the two main pillars holding the PHP ecosystem together. PHP’s continued relevance largely depends on these platforms. When we look at weekly and monthly PHP activity on GitHub, it’s clear that new development and innovation within the ecosystem have significantly slowed down.
Opposing arguments will likely persist for some time, but the reason is mostly economic rather than technical. Many companies and startups were built on PHP over the years. A shrinking PHP developer pool represents a serious risk for those companies and for ecosystem players like Laravel itself. This explains Laravel’s heavy investment in content creators and community marketing. Still, I believe these efforts have limited impact on attracting the next generation of developers.
Meanwhile, full-stack JavaScript offers a major time advantage. Being able to build frontend, backend, tooling, and even infrastructure-related layers using a single language dramatically improves development speed and team efficiency. This is an area where PHP struggles to compete, especially for new projects.
It’s also worth noting that the PHP user base largely consists of an older developer demographic working with legacy systems. This explains why PHP is still widely used but it doesn’t make it a technology that shapes the future.
In conclusion, PHP is still alive, still profitable, and still doing its job. But when it comes to modern architectures, distributed systems, event-driven design, and today’s backend expectations, PHP is no longer setting the rules of the game it’s simply trying to remain part of it.
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PHP remains functional and profitable but has lost its strategic position in modern development. Laravel and WordPress sustain the ecosystem, yet GitHub activity shows declining innovation. Full-stack JavaScript offers superior development speed through unified language usage across all layers. The PHP user base skews toward older developers maintaining legacy systems. While PHP continues serving existing applications, it no longer drives modern architecture patterns like distributed systems and event-driven design.

PHP Is Alive But No Longer Strategic

I relate to this a lot.
I started my career working on PHP/Laravel for a 10+ year old product, and it’s still doing real business today.
We’re now gradually moving parts of that system to Node.js, but the reality is:
you can’t just “walk away” from a decade of stable PHP code.
There’s a huge dependency surface — business logic, integrations, workflows — that still relies on PHP.
From my experience, PHP isn’t dead, it’s anchored to legacy success.
Node.js makes far more sense for new services and modern architectures,
but PHP continues to exist because it already solved problems at scale years ago.
So yes — PHP may not be shaping the future,
but it’s still very much powering the present for many companies.
Good perspective shared 👍

I don’t agree with that. While it is true that the javascript eco-system is very vibrant it is also true that it is a complete mess and riddled with security vulnerabilities, performance issues and and drama (oracle …)
There are many usefull projects popping up in PHP and personally i feel any alpha version of any php project is more mature than any stable version of any js project.
If anything I would call PHP Strategic and JS Experimental

For me, switching from PHP to JS is like just repainting the walls. If I’m going to change something, I want a whole new foundation, that’s why I’d choose Go or Rust instead of JS.

It always depends… For Medium Business Websites with a strong SEO Focus Stuff like Statamic is always superior to that JS / Headless CMS due to way less complexity. For bigger Apps with a strong API need JS stuff is maybe better, but you still need strong APIs where for 99% of Websites PHP is still fine. Nobody wants to write APIs with node :D