Why Codeigniter is better than laravel?

You're going to get a biased answer on this forum because it's a codeigniter forum. If you go to the Laravel forum, you'll get plenty of laravel love and lots of codeigniter bashing. If you go to other sources of information (reddit/r/php, stack overflow, amazon), you'll generally find that most people have a very negative view of codeigniter.

The fact is that both frameworks can do pretty much anything you want. Laravel has a lot baked in like authentication, file system libraries, websocket support, notifications, API libraries, and a lot more. It also come pre built with a lot of support for VueJS as a front end framework. The problem with Laravel is that unless you're willing to stay on the cutting edge, you can quickly find yourself 3-4 versions behind the latest version of Laravel and unfortunately, it's quite a pain in the a$$ to perform upgrades. They've somewhat mitigated this with LTS versions, but it's still really annoying.

Codeigniter is more of a 'micro' framework by todays standards. Out of the box it is extremely fast and easy to start customizing. It's simple to understand and has tons and tons of resources available because it hasn't changed much in the last 6-7 years. This has it's upsides in terms of stability and ease of finding help. If you're going to install everything that's in Laravel to begin with, codeigniter will lose a bit of it's speed, but at least you'll be able to pick and choose what you want.

From the discussions on the forum and some of the code I've seen on Git, CI4 is going to make giant strides towards what is considered 'modern' nowadays. It will definitely narrow a lot of the gaps between Laravel and Codeigniter as it stands now.

If I were you, I'd make sure your programming philosophy aligns more with that of Taylor Otwell or that of Kilishan and BCIT. That will probably save you headaches down the road.

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