11 Best Laravel Framework Courses & Certifications Online in 2026

Last updated: October 2026. Written by Josh Hutcheson, OnlineCourseing editor. See our review methodology.

QUICK VERDICT

Laravel is the most popular PHP framework by a wide margin: an elegant, full-featured toolkit for building web applications, from side projects to large SaaS products. It is a strong career skill for PHP developers. It also moves fast, shipping a major version roughly once a year (Laravel 13 arrived in Q1 2026), which is why so many “best Laravel course” lists still recommend tutorials for Laravel 6, 7 and 8. We checked every resource below live on 28 October 2026, recording its rating, last-updated date and the Laravel version it teaches, and we flag the stale ones instead of hiding them.

Why Learn Laravel?

Laravel took PHP, still the language behind a large share of the web, and gave it a modern, expressive framework and a deep first-party ecosystem: Eloquent ORM, Blade templating, queues, authentication starter kits, Livewire for reactive interfaces, and tools like Forge and Laravel Cloud for deployment. That ecosystem is a big part of why Laravel developers stay in demand and why the framework is a favorite for shipping SaaS products quickly. Learning it well means understanding the “Laravel way” of structuring an application, not only the syntax, and keeping up with a framework that changes every year. That last point shapes our recommendations more than for any other framework we cover.

Laravel’s release policy makes the point concrete. Each major version gets bug fixes for 18 months and security fixes for two years. Laravel 12 stopped receiving bug fixes on 13 August 2026 and gets security fixes until 24 February 2027; Laravel 13, which supports PHP 8.3 to 8.5, gets bug fixes until Q3 2027 (Laravel release notes, read 28 October 2026). A course is “current” if it teaches Laravel 12 or 13; Laravel 11 material still transfers; anything older needs a translation layer.

Laravel vs Symfony and other PHP frameworks

Symfony is Laravel’s closest rival, and the two are related: Laravel is built on many Symfony components. The practical difference is philosophy. Laravel favors convention, expressive defaults and an integrated ecosystem (queues, Livewire, starter kits, hosted deployment) so a small team ships fast. Symfony favors explicit configuration and long-term-support releases, which is why it is common in large enterprise codebases and agencies maintaining big systems. For a first PHP framework, Laravel’s documentation, learning resources and job postings for product companies make it the easier entry point; Symfony knowledge transfers well later. Lighter frameworks such as CodeIgniter or Slim are fine for small projects but have far fewer current courses.

If you are choosing between ecosystems rather than PHP frameworks, compare with our guides to Django (Python) and NestJS (TypeScript); all three solve the same problems, and the language you already know should usually decide.

The Best Laravel Courses at a Glance

Ratings, review counts and update dates were read on each course page on 28 October 2026. Udemy prices change daily, so we do not print them; the Udemy courses here are usually on sale.

1. Laracasts (Best Overall)

Laracasts, created by Jeffrey Way, is where much of the Laravel community learns the framework, and it is our top recommendation on merit. It is a library of short, high-quality screencasts that is updated as Laravel changes, from beginner series to testing, Livewire, Inertia and Filament. The place to start is Laravel From Scratch (2026 Edition): 43 episodes and 9 hours 40 minutes, last updated 14 January 2026, covering routing, Eloquent, authentication, authorization, queues, testing and a full deployment. Laracasts now points learners from its older Laravel 11 series, 30 Days to Learn Laravel (last updated May 2024), to this edition.

The full library costs $25 a month on the monthly Solo plan (Laracasts also sells yearly and lifetime plans). For a framework that changes every year, a maintained library beats a fixed course that ages the day it is published. We are not an affiliate for Laracasts; we recommend it because it is the right answer for Laravel.

Best for: anyone serious about Laravel. Skip if: you want a single course you own outright; pick #4 instead.

2. PHP with Laravel for Beginners (Best Structured Udemy Course)

Edwin Diaz’s PHP with Laravel for Beginners is still one of the most-reviewed Laravel courses on Udemy: 4.4 stars from 13,036 ratings and 58,828 students. It is beginner-friendly and includes a PHP grounding, which helps if you arrive without much PHP. The honest caveat matters more every year: it was last updated in March 2021, so it predates Laravel 9 through 13, including the new starter kits and the slimmer application structure. The concepts (routing, controllers, Eloquent relationships) still hold, but you will be translating syntax as you go. Today, Piotr Jura’s course (#4) is the better buy-once choice; choose this one only if its slower, PHP-first pace suits you.

3. Laravel Docs + Bootcamp (Best Free)

Laravel’s official documentation is among the best of any framework, and the official bootcamp now lives at laravel.com/learn as two free mini video courses. Getting Started with Laravel (13 lessons, about 120 minutes) builds your first full-stack application from start to finish, including routes, views and Eloquent. PHP Fundamentals (10 lessons, 71 minutes) covers the modern PHP you need first. Because both come from the Laravel team, they track the current release.

For a developer with some PHP background, the docs plus these two courses are a complete free starting point, and the documentation is the reference you will keep returning to whichever paid resource you choose. There is no certificate, and the courses are short, so expect to build a second project on your own to make it stick.

4. Laravel & PHP Mastery: Build 5 Real-World Projects (Best Current Udemy Course)

Piotr Jura’s Laravel & PHP Mastery is the most current well-reviewed one-time purchase on Udemy: 4.5 stars from 6,522 ratings, 36,737 students, a Bestseller badge, and a last update in August 2025. As the title says, it is built around five production-style applications rather than isolated lessons, which is how Laravel actually sticks. Jura has taught more than 73,000 students across his courses.

Best for: learners who want one structured course they own, with projects to put on GitHub. Skip if: you need the absolute latest release features; pair it with the Laravel 13 release notes or Laracasts for those.

5. Let’s Learn Laravel & Livewire: A Guided Path For Beginners

Brad Schiff’s Let’s Learn Laravel & Livewire (4.5 stars from 1,344 ratings, 7,289 students, updated April 2025) is the gentlest on-ramp here. It needs no prior programming experience, teaches PHP, Laravel 11 and Livewire together, and builds a social-style app with following, search, chat and a Livewire section. Schiff’s teaching is slow and clear, which suits true beginners more than developers switching from another framework.

Best for: complete beginners who want Livewire from the start. Skip if: you already know PHP well; the pace will feel slow.

6. Laravel Daily (Best for Practical Patterns)

Povilas Korop’s Laravel Daily is the resource working Laravel developers recommend once they are past the basics. Its premium library covers design patterns, real project structure, testing, APIs and, recently, NativePHP for mobile apps, in short, focused lessons. Pricing on 28 October 2026 was $29 a month, $129 a year or $399 for lifetime access, and the free YouTube channel is worth following either way.

Best for: developers who know the basics and want to write Laravel the way experienced teams do. Skip if: you are brand new; start with #1, #3 or #5. We are not an affiliate.

7. Codecourse (Best Project Screencasts)

Codecourse is a library of practical Laravel screencasts built around real projects: a realtime chat with Laravel Reverb, a comment system, a forum with Inertia, uptime monitors and more. Its Getting Started with Laravel course is 23 episodes and 2 hours 32 minutes, and the rest of the library sits behind a Pro membership. It is less of a curriculum than Laracasts and more of a “watch someone build it properly” collection, which is exactly what many intermediate developers need. We are not an affiliate.

8. Pluralsight Laravel Path (Best Structured Path With Labs)

Pluralsight’s Laravel path bundles 5 courses and 5 guided labs (about 17 hours), from Mateo Prigl’s Laravel Fundamentals (5 hours 24 minutes, beginner, last updated February 2024) to intermediate courses on Eloquent, events and middleware, and testing and deployment by Matt Stauffer. The guided labs, several published in 2026, run in the browser, so you practice without setting up a local environment. A Skill IQ assessment tells you where to start.

Best for: learners who like a defined sequence with hands-on labs, and anyone whose employer already pays for Pluralsight. Skip if: you only need Laravel; a Laracasts subscription is cheaper and deeper on this one framework. See our Pluralsight review for plans.

9. Master Full-Stack Web Development with Laravel & PHP (Coursera)

Board Infinity’s Laravel & PHP course on Coursera (4.2 stars from 208 reviews, 17,243 enrolled) is the option if a shareable Coursera certificate matters to you or your employer. It covers PHP and Laravel fundamentals through a full-stack build. The teaching is less polished than Laracasts and the review count is small, so we rank it on the certificate, not the instruction. It is included with Coursera Plus, which costs $59 a month.

10. Learn Laravel by Building a Medium Clone (freeCodeCamp)

freeCodeCamp’s Learn Laravel by Building a Medium Clone is a free, 7-hour project course from The Codeholic, published on freeCodeCamp’s YouTube channel about a year ago. You build a fully working blogging platform with authentication, posts, following and a polished UI. It is the best free complete build we found. Avoid freeCodeCamp’s older 2019 Laravel course, which teaches Laravel 5.8.

11. Program With Gio: Learn PHP The Right Way + Laravel Builds

Gio’s channel is the best free route if your PHP needs work first. His Learn PHP The Right Way series teaches PHP 8 from beginner to advanced, and his four-part Let’s Build Task Tracker App With Laravel series (about 15 hours, published in 2026) covers architecture and authentication, recurring-task logic, a dashboard and refactoring, and testing, mocking and deployment. It shows how an experienced developer structures a real application, at no cost.

How to Choose the Right Laravel Course

Because Laravel changes every year, currency should drive the choice. If you are serious about Laravel, Laracasts is the most reliable path because it does not go stale. If you want a one-time purchase, Piotr Jura’s Udemy course is the current pick and Brad Schiff’s is the gentlest for true beginners. If you are budget-conscious and comfortable reading, the official courses and docs plus the freeCodeCamp and Program With Gio builds will take you a long way at no cost. Already past the basics? Laravel Daily and Codecourse are where intermediate developers go next.

A step-by-step Laravel learning path

• Modern PHP first (1 to 2 weeks). Laravel’s free PHP Fundamentals course, or Program With Gio’s PHP series. Classes, namespaces, Composer and types matter more than syntax trivia.
• One guided app (1 week). The official Getting Started with Laravel course: routes, views, Blade and Eloquent end to end.
• One structured course (4 to 6 weeks). Laravel From Scratch on Laracasts, or Piotr Jura’s Udemy course. Code every episode yourself.
• Your own project (4+ weeks). Authentication, relationships, validation, a queued job, an API endpoint and feature tests with Pest or PHPUnit.
• Deploy it. Laravel Cloud, Forge or any PHP host. A live URL and a clean repository are what hiring managers check.

Match the course to your background

New to PHP itself? Start with our guide to the best PHP courses. Building the front end too? See our JavaScript courses and full-stack courses guides.

What a Good Laravel Course Covers

Use this list to judge whether a course is complete. The foundations are routing, controllers and Blade templating, then the heart of Laravel: Eloquent, including relationships, migrations, factories and seeding. A serious course then covers request validation, middleware, authentication and authorization (policies and gates), and RESTful APIs with API resources and Sanctum. The productivity layer comes next: queues and jobs, events and notifications, the task scheduler and Artisan commands.

The best courses also introduce the wider ecosystem: Laravel’s current starter kits (React, Vue and Livewire variants introduced with Laravel 12, which succeed the older Breeze and Jetstream kits), Livewire for reactive interfaces without heavy JavaScript, Inertia if you prefer Vue or React, and deployment. Above all, they teach testing with Pest or PHPUnit, which separates professional Laravel work from copy-paste tutorials. Confirm the course targets Laravel 11 or later; a course built on Laravel 6 or 7 teaches a project structure that has since changed. Laravel sits on a database, so solid SQL pays off, and Docker helps with local environments.

Red flags in a Laravel course

• No version stated, or Laravel 9 and earlier. The project skeleton, starter kits and configuration changed substantially after that.
• No tests anywhere. A course that never writes a feature test is teaching tutorials, not production Laravel.
• Auth built entirely by hand with no mention of starter kits. Fine as a learning exercise, but you should also see how the official kits handle it.
• A last-updated date more than two years old on a course that sells itself as current. Check the curriculum page, not the marketing title.
• Reviews that complain about errors on install. That usually means the course pins an old version you can no longer install cleanly.

Free Laravel tutorials, PDFs and “free download” sites

Searches for a free Laravel tutorial PDF or a “free download” of a paid course are common. The legitimate free material is better than most of what those searches return: the official documentation (versioned for each release, so you can read the docs for exactly the version you use), the two official courses at laravel.com/learn, and the freeCodeCamp and Program With Gio builds above. Sites offering paid Laravel Daily, Laracasts or Udemy courses as free downloads are distributing pirated copies; the files are often outdated, sometimes bundled with malware, and they leave out the instructor Q&A and updates that make a paid course worth having. If price is the obstacle, start free, then buy one course on a Udemy sale or one month of Laracasts and work through it fast.

How long does it take to learn Laravel?

With working PHP, most developers build a basic CRUD application within a week of starting and feel productive in four to eight weeks of part-time study. Becoming job-ready, meaning comfortable with Eloquent relationships, authorization, queues, an API and a real test suite, usually takes two to four months of building rather than watching. Starting from zero programming experience, add one to two months for PHP fundamentals first. The step that shortens this most is building your own project early instead of finishing course after course.

Is There a Laravel Certification?

There is no single, widely recognized Laravel certification of the kind AWS or Microsoft run. Laravel’s official courses issue none, and employers weigh demonstrable work far more than any certificate: a deployed app, a package, real Eloquent and testing experience. A strong GitHub repository and a live application are the credential that moves hiring decisions for Laravel roles.

Courses that do issue a certificate

If you want something to add to LinkedIn: Coursera’s Laravel & PHP course (#9) issues a shareable certificate with Coursera Plus; every Udemy course here issues a certificate of completion; Pluralsight records completed courses and Skill IQ scores. Treat these as evidence that you finished a course, and let your project prove the skill.

Laravel Courses — FAQ

What is the best Laravel course?

On merit, Laracasts: its Laravel From Scratch (2026 Edition) series was updated in January 2026 and the paid library stays current with each release. For a one-time Udemy purchase, Piotr Jura’s Laravel & PHP Mastery (4.5 stars from 6,522 ratings, updated August 2025) is the most current well-reviewed option. If you want to spend nothing, Laravel’s own Getting Started with Laravel course at laravel.com/learn is the best free start.

Can I learn Laravel for free?

Yes. Laravel’s official site has two free mini video courses (Getting Started with Laravel, 13 lessons and about two hours, and PHP Fundamentals, 10 lessons), and the documentation is excellent. freeCodeCamp’s 7-hour Medium-clone build and Program With Gio’s task-tracker series on YouTube are both free full projects.

Do I need to know PHP before learning Laravel?

Yes. Laravel is a PHP framework, so working PHP makes everything smoother. If yours is rusty, take Laravel’s free 71-minute PHP Fundamentals course first, or Program With Gio’s Learn PHP The Right Way series; see our best PHP courses guide for paid options.

Why are so many Laravel courses out of date?

Laravel ships a major version roughly every year (Laravel 13 arrived in Q1 2026), so fixed video courses age quickly. Starter kits, authentication scaffolding and folder structure all changed between Laravel 10 and 12. Check a course’s last-updated date and the Laravel version it targets before you pay.

How do I learn Laravel step by step?

Get comfortable with modern PHP, then build one small app with the official Getting Started course. Next, take one structured course (Laracasts or a current Udemy course) and build a second, larger project on your own: authentication, a database with relationships, validation, a queued job and tests. Finish by deploying it. That sequence takes most developers two to three months part-time.

Is there a free Laravel course with a certificate?

Not from Laravel itself: the official courses and docs are free but issue no certificate. Paid platforms do: Coursera’s Laravel & PHP course and Udemy courses issue completion certificates, and Pluralsight tracks progress across its Laravel path. Employers weigh a deployed project far more than any of these.

Which Laravel version should a course teach in 2026?

Ideally Laravel 12 or 13. Laravel 13 (PHP 8.3 to 8.5) is the current major release; Laravel 12 stopped receiving bug fixes on 13 August 2026 and gets security fixes until 24 February 2027. A Laravel 11 course still teaches transferable fundamentals; anything built on Laravel 9 or earlier will show you a different project structure.

Is Laracasts worth it?

For anyone committing to Laravel, yes. At $25 a month (monthly plan) it costs about the same as one Udemy course, it covers the whole ecosystem (Livewire, Inertia, Filament, testing) and it is updated as Laravel changes. If you only need one beginner course, a single Udemy course (#4 or #5) is cheaper.

Related guides: Best PHP Courses · Best Django Courses · Best NestJS Courses · Best Pluralsight Courses