CodeIgniter Does It For Me

I use CI for it's simplicity.

I have found Laravel a complete PITA to install and configure.

To each his own. My company uses CI but I have also built on laravel. Laravel is FAR more powerful out of the box, but CI is very easy to get going.

How would you compare them speed and memory wise? I know of another framework which adds a ton of "great features" automagically for you (in some cases even if you don't need them they are loaded) Unfortunately, the added extra automagic made it very slow and a memory hog in a real word high volume environment. Now they are adding on even more code to find all kinds of way's to speed it up and work around code.

One reason I personally enjoy using CI is that I start small and fast and build/add on what I need. Instead of getting all kinds of "extras" and then trying to work around and turn off the ones I don't need.

DMyers

I've built mulitple apps in l4, l5 and codeigniter. 

Codeigniter is certainly quicker out of the box than both L5 and L4 . At the end of the day it also evens out for me because for me to get CI to do everything I want, I end up reinventing the wheel and doing what is already baked into L4 and L5 anyways.

I've found that Laravel has a lot of features that help you get going very very quickly. From a better routing system, to middleware, Eloquent, and Blade, you can build a higher quality app much quicker than you can in CI3. On top of all that, using PHPUnit to test a Laravel app works right out of the box too and if you're developing enterprise software, this is a must. 

I feel a lot of codeigniter developers that hate on laravel have been in the CI world too long and just hate on things they don't necessarily understand because they haven't expanded outside of their world. Things like queues, migrations, task scheduling, and validation are all far more advanced than anything in CI3 but might be advanced for a lot of CI3 devs.

Now... I love Codeigniter because my company runs a very built out and custom version of the framework, but me and my devs have also spent countless hours coding thing that are already in laravel. Lately, we've been pulling in more and more libraries from Laravel to be a part of our application.

I'm hoping CI 4 becomes a lot more modular and allows for better unit testing and includes additional features like route filters/middleware, expanded validation, and better CMD functions like migrations.

Codeigniter is simply one of the tools you need to learn to be a successful developer. Always add more tools to your coding arsenal!