Stack Toast vs Laravel Boilerplate

Best Laravel Boilerplate Alternative (and Why)

Short answer: If you found Laravel Boilerplate while searching for "laravel boilerplate" but need a modern, maintained, production-ready solution, Stack Toast is the best alternative because it provides everything the legacy boilerplate promised but with Laravel 12, active development, payment processing, AI integration, and security updates that won't leave you stranded on 5-year-old technology.

The Evolution Story

Laravel Boilerplate (2020 vision):
"A comprehensive Laravel starter with user management and admin features"

What Actually Happened

Project abandoned in 2020 - Despite the promising vision, Laravel Boilerplate was effectively abandoned by its maintainers shortly after its last major update in August 2020. The project creator moved on to other ventures, leaving the community without official support, updates, or roadmap for future development. This left thousands of developers who had built projects on this foundation stranded with a rapidly aging codebase.

No updates for Laravel 9, 10, 11, 12 - The Laravel ecosystem has evolved dramatically since 2020, with four major framework releases bringing significant improvements in performance, security, and developer experience. Laravel Boilerplate remains stuck on Laravel 8, missing out on modern features like improved routing, better caching, enhanced database capabilities, and the latest security enhancements that are essential for production applications.

Security vulnerabilities never patched - As security researchers discover new vulnerabilities in Laravel 8 and related packages, these issues remain unpatched in Laravel Boilerplate. This creates an ever-growing list of known security holes that could be exploited by attackers, putting your application and user data at increasing risk over time. The lack of security updates makes the project unsuitable for any production environment where data protection is a priority.

Dependencies became incompatible - The PHP and Laravel package ecosystem has evolved significantly since 2020, with many essential packages dropping support for older PHP and Laravel versions. This creates a cascade of compatibility issues where you can't update one package without breaking others, leading to a maintenance nightmare where you're forced to choose between security updates and functionality.

Community moved on to maintained solutions - The developer community has largely abandoned Laravel Boilerplate in favor of actively maintained alternatives. This means fewer community contributions, less documentation, and reduced support from other developers. You're essentially working with a dead project that lacks the vibrant ecosystem and community support that makes Laravel development productive and enjoyable.

Stack Toast (2025 Reality)

Everything Laravel Boilerplate promised, plus everything SaaS actually needs - Stack Toast delivers on the original vision of Laravel Boilerplate while adding the modern features that successful SaaS businesses require in 2025. Unlike the abandoned project, Stack Toast provides active development, security updates, and continuous improvements that keep your application current with the latest Laravel ecosystem developments.

Built for the AI-first development era - While Laravel Boilerplate was designed before the AI revolution, Stack Toast is optimized for modern development workflows with AI coding assistants. The codebase uses patterns and structures that AI tools understand and can enhance, making development faster and more efficient. This gives you a significant competitive advantage in the current market where AI-assisted development is becoming standard.

Complete SaaS foundation from day one - Laravel Boilerplate provided basic user management and admin features, but Stack Toast includes everything needed to launch a profitable SaaS business immediately. This includes payment processing, billing systems, subscription management, business analytics, and modern security features that would take months to build from scratch.

Future-proof architecture and active community - Stack Toast is built with modern Laravel 12 and PHP 8.2+ features, ensuring compatibility with current and future framework releases. The project has an active community of developers, regular updates, and comprehensive documentation that makes it easy to build, maintain, and scale your SaaS application without the technical debt and maintenance nightmares of legacy codebases.

Security & Maintenance Concerns

The End-of-Life Problem

Laravel Boilerplate's Security Status

Built on Laravel 8 (end-of-life January 2024) - Laravel Boilerplate is built on Laravel 8, which reached end-of-life in January 2024. This means the Laravel team no longer provides security patches, bug fixes, or any form of support for this version. Using end-of-life software in production creates significant security and compliance risks that can have serious legal and financial consequences for your business.

No security updates for known vulnerabilities - Since reaching end-of-life, Laravel 8 has received zero security updates despite the discovery of multiple vulnerabilities. Security researchers continue to find and report issues in the framework, but these will never be patched. This creates an ever-growing list of known security holes that attackers can exploit to compromise your application and steal sensitive user data.

5-year-old dependencies with potential exploits - Laravel Boilerplate's dependencies are frozen at 2020 versions, many of which have known security vulnerabilities that have been patched in newer versions. These outdated packages create multiple attack vectors that could be used to gain unauthorized access to your system, inject malicious code, or compromise user accounts and sensitive business data.

Compliance issues for enterprise customers - Enterprise customers and regulatory bodies increasingly require applications to run on supported, actively maintained software. Using end-of-life frameworks can violate compliance requirements for industries like healthcare, finance, and government contracting, potentially resulting in failed audits, lost contracts, and legal liability issues.

Stack Toast's Security Status

Built on Laravel 12 (actively maintained) - Stack Toast is built on Laravel 12, the latest version of the framework with full support from the Laravel team. This ensures your application benefits from the latest security enhancements, performance improvements, and modern development features. You can be confident that your application is built on a solid, well-maintained foundation that will continue to receive updates and support.

Regular security updates applied immediately - When security vulnerabilities are discovered in Laravel or related packages, Stack Toast receives immediate patches and updates. This proactive approach to security ensures your application is protected against emerging threats and maintains the highest security standards. You don't have to worry about manually tracking and applying security updates - it's handled automatically.

Modern security practices implemented - Stack Toast incorporates the latest security best practices, including proper authentication mechanisms, secure session handling, CSRF protection, XSS prevention, and modern encryption standards. The codebase follows security guidelines that protect against common web application vulnerabilities and ensures your application meets current security standards.

Enterprise compliance ready - Stack Toast is designed to meet enterprise security and compliance requirements from day one. This includes proper logging, audit trails, data protection measures, and security controls that satisfy regulatory requirements for industries like healthcare, finance, and government contracting. You can confidently present your application to enterprise customers without compliance concerns.

The Maintenance Nightmare

What using Laravel Boilerplate means in 2025:

# Trying to install Laravel Boilerplate today
composer install
# Error: Package conflicts with modern dependencies

npm install  
# Error: Node packages have security vulnerabilities

php artisan migrate
# Error: Database schema conflicts with Laravel 12

# Hours of debugging outdated code...

What using Stack Toast means:

# Installing Stack Toast
unzip stack-toast.zip
./configure-stacktoast.sh
# ✅ Everything works immediately

Development Experience: 2020 vs 2025

The Time Warp Problem

Laravel Boilerplate Development (2020 style):

// jQuery and Bootstrap patterns from 2020
$(document).ready(function() {
    $('.delete-button').click(function() {
        if(confirm('Are you sure?')) {
            // Manual form submission
        }
    });
});

Stack Toast Development (2025 style):

// Alpine.js + AI-assisted development
<div x-data="{ 
    confirmDelete() { 
        if (confirm('Delete user?')) this.deleteUser() 
    }
}">
    <!-- AI generates this component structure -->
</div>

AI-Assisted Development

Laravel Boilerplate + AI Coding

Inconsistent patterns confuse AI assistants - Laravel Boilerplate's codebase contains a mix of different architectural patterns, coding styles, and approaches that were common in 2020 but are now considered inconsistent. AI coding assistants like Cursor and GitHub Copilot struggle to understand these mixed patterns, often suggesting code that doesn't fit the existing structure or conflicts with the project's conventions.

Outdated code examples in AI training - AI models are trained on code from various time periods, but Laravel Boilerplate's patterns are from 2020 and earlier. When AI assistants suggest improvements or new features, they often recommend modern Laravel patterns that don't exist in Laravel 8, leading to confusion and wasted development time as you try to adapt suggestions to the older framework version.

Mixed jQuery/Vue patterns create conflicts - Laravel Boilerplate uses a combination of jQuery and Vue.js for frontend interactions, which creates inconsistent patterns that confuse AI assistants. The AI doesn't know whether to suggest jQuery-based solutions or Vue.js components, often leading to suggestions that conflict with the existing frontend architecture and require significant refactoring to implement.

AI suggests modern Laravel features that don't exist - When working with AI assistants on Laravel Boilerplate, you'll frequently receive suggestions for Laravel features, methods, and patterns that were introduced in Laravel 9, 10, 11, or 12. Since the project is stuck on Laravel 8, these suggestions are unusable and create frustration as you have to constantly explain to the AI that these features aren't available in your version.

Stack Toast + AI Coding

Consistent service architecture AI understands - Stack Toast uses a clean, consistent service-based architecture that AI coding assistants can easily understand and work with. The predictable patterns and clear separation of concerns make it easy for AI to suggest appropriate code improvements, new features, and architectural enhancements that fit seamlessly into the existing codebase structure.

Modern patterns in AI training data - Stack Toast is built with modern Laravel 12 patterns and PHP 8.2+ features that are well-represented in AI training data. This means AI assistants can provide accurate, up-to-date suggestions that actually work with the current framework version, saving you time and reducing the need to adapt or rewrite AI-generated code.

Clean Alpine.js components AI can enhance - Stack Toast uses Alpine.js consistently throughout the frontend, providing a clean, predictable pattern that AI assistants can easily understand and enhance. The AI can suggest new Alpine.js components, improve existing ones, and help you build interactive features that integrate seamlessly with the existing frontend architecture.

AI suggests features that actually work - Because Stack Toast uses modern Laravel 12 and current best practices, AI assistants can suggest features and improvements that are actually implementable and beneficial. The AI understands the codebase structure, can suggest appropriate service methods, and help you build new features that follow the established patterns and conventions.

Real experience: Using Cursor with Laravel Boilerplate feels like fighting the codebase - you spend more time explaining why suggestions won't work than actually implementing them. Using Cursor with Stack Toast feels like pair programming with a Laravel expert who understands your codebase and can provide helpful, actionable suggestions that make development faster and more enjoyable.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Why does Laravel Boilerplate still rank #1 for "laravel boilerplate"?

SEO momentum from 2015-2020 when it was actively maintained. Search engines haven't fully caught up to the fact that it's been abandoned. This is why many developers find it first but quickly realize it's outdated.

The trap: High search ranking ≠ current relevance or usability.

Q: Can I update Laravel Boilerplate to Laravel 12 myself?

Technically possible but not practical. You'd need to upgrade through Laravel 9, 10, 11, 12 (each has breaking changes), update all dependencies, rewrite jQuery code, fix Bootstrap compatibility, and test everything extensively.

Time estimate: 40-60 hours of upgrade work vs 30 minutes with Stack Toast.

Q: Is Laravel Boilerplate really abandoned?

The evidence:

• • Last commit: August 2020
• • No Laravel 9, 10, 11, 12 compatibility
• • No security updates for known vulnerabilities
• • No response to GitHub issues
• • Creator moved on to other projects

The reality: Yes, it's effectively abandoned despite still ranking in search results.

Q: What if I need the exact features Laravel Boilerplate had?

Good news: Stack Toast includes everything Laravel Boilerplate provided, plus modern features:

Laravel Boilerplate features Stack Toast includes:

• ✅ User management with roles and permissions
• ✅ Admin panel (but much more comprehensive)
• ✅ Authentication system (but with more methods)
• ✅ Basic frontend templates (but modern and complete)

Plus everything Laravel Boilerplate was missing:

• ✅ Payment processing and billing
• ✅ AI integration capabilities
• ✅ Modern security features
• ✅ Business intelligence dashboard
• ✅ Production deployment guides

Q: What about the open-source advantage?

Laravel Boilerplate: Open source but abandoned
Stack Toast: Full source code ownership with active updates

The trade-off: Open source doesn't help if there's no maintenance. Paid with updates is better than free without support. Stack Toast gives you source code ownership anyway.

Q: Can I contribute to Laravel Boilerplate to fix issues?

Theoretically yes, practically no. The project is effectively abandoned:

• • Pull requests sit unmerged
• • No active maintainer response
• • Major architectural changes needed
• • Community has moved on

Better approach: Use your development time on Stack Toast, which is actively maintained and welcomes community input.

Q: Is Stack Toast just Laravel Boilerplate with payments added?

No. Stack Toast is a complete rewrite for modern SaaS development:

Different architecture:

• • Service-based vs controller-heavy
• • Laravel 12 vs Laravel 8
• • Modern PHP vs legacy patterns
• • AI-optimized vs traditional patterns

Different scope:

• • Complete SaaS foundation vs basic admin
• • Revenue-focused vs learning-focused
• • Production-ready vs development-only

Different philosophy:

• • Ship fast vs learn slowly
• • AI-first vs manual development
• • Business-focused vs feature-focused

The Bottom Line: Legacy vs Future

Laravel Boilerplate Reality Check

5 Years Outdated

Laravel Boilerplate runs on Laravel 8 (end-of-life) and was last updated in August 2020. This creates serious security, compatibility, and maintenance issues for any production application.

Security Vulnerabilities

End-of-life frameworks don't receive security patches. Known vulnerabilities remain unpatched, creating compliance issues for enterprise customers and insurance problems for businesses.

No Business Features

Laravel Boilerplate lacks payment processing, billing systems, business analytics, and modern SaaS features. You can't build a revenue-generating SaaS without these fundamentals.

Abandoned Project

No support, no updates, no community response. Using abandoned software for business applications creates unnecessary risks and technical debt.

Stack Toast Modern Solution

Current Technology

Built on Laravel 12 with PHP 8.2+ features, modern security practices, and active development. Stay current with the latest Laravel ecosystem improvements and security updates.

Complete SaaS Foundation

200+ production-ready features including payment processing, business intelligence, user management, and everything needed to launch a profitable SaaS immediately.

AI Integration

Built-in AI capabilities provide competitive advantages through intelligent features that justify premium pricing and create sustainable market differentiation.

Production Ready

Enterprise-grade security, deployment guides, monitoring setup, and everything needed for professional SaaS deployment and scaling.

The choice between legacy risk and modern opportunity is obvious.