Essential Laravel Tooling for 2026

It’s a pretty good indicator of how rapidly things are progressing in Laravel-land when a summary article such as this can be rendered totally obsolete within the space of over a year (hence the need for such articles that keep you ahead of the game). Laravel’s tooling, developer, and agent experience has come along very quickly, so I’m going to pick the essential tools to empower developers in 2026.

PHPStorm

I believe the phrase for this section is “this is a hill I am willing to die on”

Anybody can potentially write a blog article like this, which “rounds up Laravel”, and get AI to generate the content. Anybody. And you’d probably be right in your conclusion, which is that it would make it fairly useless. So, with that in mind, you’re going to get my opinion, rather than something generic.

JetBrains’ PhpStorm is just light years ahead as an IDE, and has been for some time. Previously, I would have said that its biggest failing is that, while Symfony development with the Symfony plugin is great, the late static binding for the way Laravel uses Facades at runtime is something that PhpStorm just couldn’t work out.

JetBrains acquired Laravel IDEA, the officially supported Laravel plugin, and then released it as part of PhpStorm. So, there are no longer any barriers. After releasing their AI agent into PhpStorm, you can also bring your own agent. Add the AI level on top of the fact that its Intellisense just gets your PHP code, with unrivalled UI for databases, Docker, XDebug, you name it: I just don’t see anything close. Every time I’ve tried to configure VS Code (you could put Cursor into this bracket, as it’s wrapped VSC), I’ve always found it fiddly to pick the right combination of 3rd-party plugins to rival the power of PhpStorm.

The only other blocker might be cost. Given that you have to get a pro license, if you’re short on cash, I’d suggest attending one of the many PHP meetups in person, or the Laravel Worldwide Meetup, where licenses are raffled away regularly due to JetBrains’ support of the PHP community.

XDebug

If you don’t empower your developers, prepare for slow ticket turnover

In the past five years or so, some new tooling has popped up around debugging. Spatie’s Ray and enhanced debugging with Ignition are just two, but I’d still say that XDebug is just unrivalled in its power. 

Previously, the biggest friction point with XDebug was setting it up - not just at a command-line execution level, but then making sure your IDE picks up requests. This, however, has changed (and changed for the better some time ago). Setting up XDebug even within a local development environment that uses Docker is significantly easier and better documented. Those using Laravel Sail, for instance, even have the documentation cover set up for them.

I didn’t start using XDebug until about 2020, which is kind of mind-blowing when I think about it. If you are a tech lead and not empowering your developers with it, you are absolutely underpowering your team. For apps that have scaled out and contain complex patterns - especially adding in things like Octane, or Vapor, XDebug is absolutely essential. Nothing comes close to the step debugger, the ability to modify runtime, and the performance tooling you can run with it. 

Laravel Boost

The ups and downs of AI usage

I tried, just out of curiosity, to write a ToDo app that used Vonage and Livewire from scratch, using Cursor (which would then switch agents based on what it deemed most appropriate; I think Claude was used mostly in my case). It was, quite frankly, hopeless. I also tried to get it to implement API Platform and asked it to do some more complex work, like implementing a form of HATEOAS. It could not do this to any sort of usable standard (in fact, it actually circumvented the conventions of how API Platform actually worked by hard-coding things in).

In a different article, I created the same type of app, but this time I was writing it with the intention of turning it into a native Android app using NativePHP. This time, I installed Laravel Boost, the supported MCP server. The difference was light-and-day.

Not only can it boost your agents, but it also provides documentation help and has official support if you use Laravel Herd as your local development environment. Neat.

Laravel Herd

Who remembers WAMP? Herd makes it look almost prehistoric!

Given that I had previously used Laravel Sail in almost all of my projects, this one was a bit of a game-changer. The issue I have always found with Docker-based environments is that they are supposed to solve the problem of portability, but ultimately don’t. I still always managed to run into that one gotcha, like XDebug isn’t working, then find out “aaah, that depends on what OS you are running, you can do this in Linux and not this on a Mac.

Herd got up and running so quickly, with PHP and Node version orchestration, nginx, and FPM, that I couldn’t quite believe it. The pro version contains some really nice extras, such as XDebug integration, and most importantly for me, Expose integration. At Vonage, we work with Webhooks a lot in the Voice API and Messages API for incoming data, so the ability to expose your local app to the outside world, so that Webhooks can reach you, is sort of priceless.

The Entire Cloud Platform

Things become tricky with so many possibilities

This one is a bit trickier to get your head around, because the official offers from Laravel are now quite numerous. I’d say, as a starter, the quickest production environment to use will be Laravel Cloud. It’s designed with ease of use in mind and has an intuitive UI. However, ease comes at a cost, and Laravel Cloud is understandably a bit more expensive than taking on some of your DevOps infrastructure.

For that layer of complete control, I’d still say right now that Forge gives you the most options. Not only can you use your own Cloud provider (including the latest Laravel-provisioned VPS), but Envoyer has now been rolled into it, meaning all deploys are now zero-downtime. 

You’ve also got integrations with commonly used logging platforms, such as Sentry or Papertrail. There’s even an OpenClaw integration, which, personally, right now (if it were my production environment anyway), I would run a mile from. But if you know what you’re doing with your security setup, there’s potential for a lot of workflow automation there.

API Platform

Meet Webby, the API Platform mascot

Sure, it’s been around for over ten years. However, it hasn’t been natively supported on Laravel, and now it is. If you are aiming for your Laravel app to have a frontend SPA such as Vue or React, I now regard API Platform as essential. A few sets of attributes added to your Eloquent model, a few configuration changes here and there, and your frontend has the ability to CRUD all of your app. For that reason alone (aside from the ability to switch standards, or even use multiple formatting standards depending on request headers), I’m firming in the “must” camp.

Laravel Nightwatch & Pulse

Laravel monitoring, written by Laravel, for your Laravel stuff

I have written an article on the speed at which you can get full cloud performance monitoring with Nightwatch, and it comes with a dizzying amount of features. Particularly impressive features include the ability to drill into your requests, analyse your Eloquent ORM SQL requests, track exceptions, and performance bottlenecks. 

Sure, you could use existing 3rd party tooling to do this, but the difference here is that Nightwatch is aware of your PHP code. That’s because it’s written by Laravel, so you can get insight that general loggers or Application Performance Monitors (APMs) cannot. 

For a local development environment, go with Pulse, which is essentially Nightwatch Lite for running locally.

PHPStan

Static Analysis to the rescue

There is a very specific reason why I’ve chosen PHPStan rather than Laravel Pint. This is because I think it’s a fundamental skill to know how to use and configure PHPStan. There are, of course, plenty of options, such as Laravel Pint, that handle almost all of the configuration for you, but I feel it's important to understand the basics of how PHPStan works under the hood. Static analysis has been around a while now, thanks to the Abstract Syntax Tree, and anything you can add to your stack that ensures code quality, I would insist on using it. There isn’t a specific reason that I’ve chosen PHPStan over PsalmPHP, only that I am more familiar with one over the other.

Laravel Livewire

Move Your Backend To Your Frontend By Magic

Even though it’s been around for some time now, Laravel Livewire has made me not hate front-end development anymore. It’s likely you’ve heard of it, but essentially, the premise is that you can write backend components that contain logic that is pushed to the frontend. Livewire is usually paired with AlpineJS and Tailwind to form the TALL stack. 

As someone who regularly struggles with front-end work, I've found this combination a breeze to work with for some time. If you want to check out some of the capabilities of what happens when you really ramp up the possibilities, check out this article on pairing Livewire with Vonage RCS and Websockets, Reverb, and Echo.

Your Test Suite of Choice

No Test Lab, No Reliable Code

Sometimes choice is great, other times it is a curse. In Laravel’s case, it’s fairly straightforward that you can choose between PHPUnit and PEST. 

PEST also uses PHPUnit at runtime, so if, for some reason (the best I can think of here is a migration between the two), you need both environments, you’ve got them. As discussions between Sebastian Bergmann and Nuno Maduro have shown, experienced engineers don’t care what weapon you have chosen: just that you are doing Test-Driven Development. I still find it remarkable that it took at least 3 or 4 roles in my PHP career before I worked somewhere that took it seriously.

Vonage PHP SDK

If you have any need for your Laravel to use any form of communications: be it Video, RCS, SMS, Voice cloud integrations or Security, the Vonage PHP SDK makes it a breeze. Written and maintained by Vonage’s PHP experts (your author is included) by hand, you can plug in your Vonage credentials and then fetch an entire SDK to easily integrate with our services. To install the SDK, use Composer:

composer require vonage/client-core

As an example, here is the bare minimum amount of code to send an SMS:

$client = new Vonage\Client(new Vonage\Client\Credentials\Basic(YOUR_API_KEY, YOUR_API_SECRET));

$sms = new Vonage\Messages\Channel\SMS\SMSText(TO_NUMBER, FROM_NUMBER, 'hello from Vonge');

$client->messages()->send($sms);

Three lines. Want to make it even nicer as a Laravel developer? You can wrap it in the Vonage Laravel Service:

composer require vonage/vonage-laravel

And now our three lines look like this:

$client = new Vonage\Client(new Vonage\Client\Credentials\Basic(YOUR_API_KEY, YOUR_API_SECRET));

$sms = new Vonage\Messages\Channel\SMS\SMSText(TO_NUMBER, FROM_NUMBER, 'hello from Vonge');

Vonage::messages()->send($sms);

Even cleaner.

Conclusion

The vast array of options can sometimes be overwhelming, so I think it’s important that, when I try out various bits of tooling, I share any knowledge I might have gained. At the end of the day, it doesn’t necessarily matter what tooling you use, so long as it’s the tooling that works for you. 

What I would say, especially if you are starting with a greenfield site for a client or even a brand-new app idea for yourself, is to choose the right tools for the job at the start. This is especially important if what you are building will need to scale fast. Something that will consume IoT data points, for instance, will need Laravel Octane or, at the very least, ReactPHP to handle vast amounts of data (just as well as Node can, I might add).

If you are at the startup stage, it might be worth learning about the Vonage Startup Program if you need to use Communications in your Laravel app. Application is straightforward, and there are $75,000 in API Credits with co-marketing options to accelerate your Laravel startup!