Best of Laravel — April 2026

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   Article

   Laravel·5w

   How I Built an AI-Powered CRM with Laravel in a Week

   A senior freelance PHP developer shares how he built an AI-powered CRM MVP for an emergency response center in under a week using Laravel. The stack included Laravel Herd for local development, Laravel Cloud for CI/CD and deployment, Tailwind CSS and Alpine.js for the frontend, and the Laravel AI SDK with OpenAI Whisper for voice transcription. Push notifications via Laravel WebPush enabled a PWA experience indistinguishable from a native app. The project's success has the developer considering turning it into a multi-tenant micro-SaaS.

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2. 2
   Article

   Laravel·5w

   From Laravel Forge to Cloud: How Filament 3xed Performance

   Filament, one of the most popular open source Laravel packages with 23 million installs, migrated from Laravel Forge to Laravel Cloud and achieved 3x faster request speeds. The migration took just three hours and unlocked autoscaling, one-click Laravel Octane via FrankenPHP, Serverless Postgres, and managed Valkey caching. Day-to-day infrastructure shrank from an 8GB/8CPU server to 2GB replicas that scale up to 10 during traffic spikes and back down automatically. The serverless database also resolved a recurring issue where hourly demo data resets degraded live user experience. While Cloud costs are comparable or slightly higher, the capabilities gained — autoscaling, managed database, Octane, worker clusters — would have required managing at least 4x more servers on Forge.

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