Laravel is a free and open-source PHP framework that provides a set of tools and resources to build modern PHP applications. With a complete ecosystem leveraging its built-in features, and a variety of compatible packages and extensions, Laravel has seen its popularity grow rapidly in the past few years, with many developers adopting it as their framework of choice for a streamlined development process.

Laravel provides powerful database tools including an ORM (Object Relational Mapper) called Eloquent, and built-in mechanisms for creating database migrations and seeders. With the command-line tool Artisan, developers can bootstrap new models, controllers, and other application components, which speeds up the overall application development.