Why Codeigniter is better than laravel?

I am using CI since 2016 for building various small projects and now recently using it on quite big projects.

For small project - website with a registration form, login and some basic HTML pages is perfect.
It takes you a few steps to setup it and it is super easy to deploy without fancy dependencies.
In Laravel took me almost 1 day to setup everything.

For big projects - CI start to fade away since the structure of the framework is not so demanding like in Laravel.
However if you are experienced developer you can easily extend CI to look more like Laravel.
In fact, I have build quite large project only with CI and I never felt that something is missing.
If I need some special architecture I can easily implement it without a lot of effort.
On the other hand it is very difficult to restructure things in Laravel.

I think that the extensibility of CI is huge plus and even if you are building large project can work out pretty good.
In the end of day it's just PHP and you can do so many things in so many different ways
That's why we love it I guess.

Cheers!