[steven_braham]

One of the things I like really well about Laravel is that it integrates with modern front-end development tools and frameworks.

They have an excellent asset manager called Elixir that acts as a wrapper for Gulp. You can even use it without Laraval. In your gulpfile, you just have to require Elixir and tell it what are the source and output directories. It even has an option to automatically suffix a random hash to your app.js and style.css for cache busting.

In your template, you only have to include the style.css or app.js and it will auto inject the latest version like this: <link rel="stylesheet" href="{{ elixir('css/all.css') }}"> will become <link rel="stylesheet" href="/assets/all-blabla.css">.

You can read more about it here: https://laravel.com/docs/5.3/elixir

The Framework also has a lot of build in stuff to simplify connecting Vue.js components to your PHP backend.

Laravel is mostly built on the idea that everything is loosely coupled.

For example, in Yii2 (another popular php framework) everything is built around the Yii ORM and routing system. Laravel strictly separates all components.

Apart from these two things, there really aren't many benefits that make Laravel stand out. I have worked a lot with both the Yii platform and the Laravel platform and it's mostly a matter of preference.

Laravel also has an official stripped down derivative called Lumen. It's meant for building API's.