Comparing Laravel Eloquent and Drupal Entity API for Content Management

Drupal Life Hacks recently published a technical comparison aimed at developers transitioning between the two platforms. The article breaks down how common tasks such as fetching, creating, and managing content are handled in Laravel through Eloquent ORM versus Drupal’s Entity API. The author provides side-by-side code examples and outlines key concepts such as data modelling, relationships, templating systems, and routing methods.

At the core, Laravel leans on object-oriented development, where models are defined in PHP and logic is handled in code. Drupal, on the other hand, emphasizes configuration over code, relying heavily on its admin UI and content entity architecture. For example, while Laravel developers create a model and migrate schema manually, Drupal users configure content types and fields through the interface. Similarly, routing in Laravel is handled in web.php, whereas Drupal uses YAML configuration and Views.

The post offers a clear summary chart comparing both frameworks across major features like caching, authorization, validation, and templating. It concludes that Laravel is ideal for projects that benefit from developer control and code-driven design. Drupal suits projects needing rich content management with minimal coding.