What are some Differences and Similarities Between Lumen and Laravel?

Lumen is not designed to replace Laravel, rather, it is a more specialized (and stripped-down) framework designed for micro-services and APIs. It took away unneeded features for an API such as HTTP sessions and cookies, and also limited the number of configuration options. Out-of-the-box, Lumen sacrified the flexibility of Laravel for speed.

However, you can add Laravel components to Lumen to extend it, so it can be used for more than just micro-services and API. However, if your goal is to extend Lumen to become a website, you might as well use Laravel instead.

They also have different use cases. Lumen and Laravel are meant to work together. For APIs and services are frequently get called, use Lumen. For user-facing applications, use Laravel.