Livewire or Inertia? Let's Hear What Taylor Otwell Says

During the recent Laracon US event, Laravel creator Taylor Otwell announced many new things and summarized the Laravel ecosystem in 2023. Part of that was discussing the full-stack and front-end development tools. So here's what he had to say about Inertia VS Livewire.

I want Laravel to be an amazing choice for front-end development, no matter what your preferred technology is.

Some frameworks go really hard on "We hate JavaScript, we don't want to write any line of JavaScript".

Other frameworks go really heavy into the other way, like "If you're not writing React, you can't work with this framework".

So we try to play a balancing act.

if you like React and Vue, Inertia is a perfect fit for you. Earlier this year, I reached out to Jonathan Reinink to let us adopt Inertia into the laravel ecosystem and help to maintain it: so a few months earlier this year, I wrote all the documentation and revised it, so we sort of officially adopted Inertia as a first party package in the Laravel ecosystem so we can ensure that it's continued to be maintained and developed for the community. and we released Inertia 1.0 earlier this year.

Another great way to write front-ends with Laravel is using Livewire, developed by Caleb Porzio. It lets you build amazing modern applications using PHP and Blade. Applications feel really interactive like they had tons of JavaScript behind them when really you're just writing PHP and Blade the whole time. And you don't have to deal with any complicated build steps or front-end scaffolding and tools, so it's a really fast development cycle.

I believe, like Inertia, Livewire should be considered a first-class citizen of the Laravel ecosystem: I'm really happy we're going to be launching Livewire 3 at livewire.laravel.com, and we want to continue offering our support to Caleb and his work on Livewire however we can, and so we're sort of considering this a first-class package in the Laravel ecosystem going forward.

Personally, I'm very glad that both tools get official support. That means that the future is bright for both of them, and developers are free to choose either Inertia or Livewire.

You can watch the full Keynote for free here on YouTube. The part that I quoted above starts at ~7 minutes.

Soon after that, Taylor also tweeted this, as a further explanation of "Livewire VS Inertia":

It's come up a few times lately so I want to clarify something regarding Livewire "vs." Inertia - and a few things about Inertia in general.

Comparing Livewire to Inertia doesn't make sense. You should compare Livewire to Vue or React.

Why? Inertia isn't a frontend framework. It is a JSON protocol specification that allows backends (not just Laravel!) to communicate to a React / Vue / Svelte frontend what page to load and with what data.

The various Inertia backend and frontend libraries essentially just provide helpers for working with that protocol.

When viewed with that understanding, Inertia is "complete software".

At heart, it is a wire protocol specification to allow you to build Laravel + React / Vue / Svelte apps monolithically - and it does that well. It is 100% complete in that regard. It solves the problem it set out to solve.

That means it is stable. You should not expect it to get loads of new features. Why? You are using Inertia in order to use Vue or React as your frontend framework.

Remember, Inertia is primarily a wire protocol. Instead, you should be keeping up with what new features Vue or React are getting.

Thank you. 😅