Both Livewire and Inertia are incredibly popular stacks for building applications in Laravel. If you’re stuck choosing between the two, let’s weigh which one is right for you.

I’ll preface this by letting you know I really didn’t want to write this, but I get asked this question a lot. I love both Livewire and Inertia equally, so this isn’t a vs comparison by any means. They’re both incredibly valuable to the Laravel ecosystem.

The goal of both solutions

Livewire and Inertia are both built to make developing reactive, SPA (Single Page Application)-style applications easier while staying within Laravel.

Instead of building a separate API and Client, Livewire and Inertia allow you to achieve a similar SPA experience without leaving Laravel. Sure, they go about it in two completely different ways, but their ultimate goals are pointed in the same direction.

And that’s why it’s so challenging to choose — they both do this incredibly well.

When to use Livewire

How Livewire works

First, let’s quickly review how Livewire works. This will make it easier to understand why you may want to use Livewire, if you’re not already familiar with it.

When you create a Livewire component (for example, a DataTable, or even a simple page that shows some information), you’re working with Blade, Laravel’s native templating language. Behind each Livewire component is a PHP class that feeds the component’s template data.

Sounds simple, but Livewire adds reactivity for changes in the class component. For example, if you press a button within a Livewire component to update some data or perform another action, Livewire will hydrate the template with any updates via an HTTP request.

The beauty here is that you can build static-like templates that react to changes without writing any JavaScript if you don’t want to. Actually, it sort of feels like magic when you first start using it.

There’s a lot more to Livewire than this (it’s incredibly powerful), but hopefully, this incredibly high-level overview gives you a better idea of how it works.

So, here are some reasons you may prefer to use Livewire.

1. If you prefer working with Blade components

If you’re comfortable working with Blade and prefer writing PHP templates directly, Livewire is the best option. A benefit of this is familiarity — you don’t need to spend time learning much more than the basics of invoking Livewire class methods if you only need basic reactivity.

And if you’re new to Laravel, you’ll get the benefit of not stepping too much outside of the framework while you build up some creative projects.

2. If you don’t have a lot of JavaScript knowledge, or don’t want to use much JavaScript

Despite Livewire heavily using JavaScript behind the scenes (with Alpine.js), you won’t feel like you’re using JavaScript at all, and you won’t need to write any JavaScript if you don’t want to.

If you need to use JavaScript, Alpine.js (by the same author) is a wonderful way to add pure client-side interaction. Alpine.js also naturally integrates into Livewire, so you won’t need to create any additional endpoints if you need to hit your backend from JavaScript events. Everything clicks together, and you can sprinkle JavaScript in, rather than building within JavaScript which you’d have to with Inertia.

3. You want to build quickly

Although Inertia also allows you to build quickly, from my experience, Livewire is faster at getting started. There’s minimal context switching since Livewire uses a component-based approach. You can get even faster by using Volt (a functional API for Livewire) by writing everything inside a single file.

4. You don’t need complex state management

While Livewire can provide state management to some degree, you won’t find anything as complex as Pinia for Vue, for example. If you need to maintain a complex store of data and have it persist, react and update through multiple interactions, you’ll find it much more difficult to do this with Livewire.

Saying that, it’s entirely possible to build complex applications with Livewire, just don’t expect it to feel like you’re working with a purely client-side framework.

5. You’d like to use Filament

It’s worth mentioning Filament, which has exploded in popularity. Filament provides a collection of Livewire components that make building applications even faster. If you fall in love with Filament, you will have to use Livewire!

6. You don’t want to worry about server-side rendering for SEO

Livewire, by default, is server-side rendered since you’re working with Blade components that render data like a traditional Laravel application. There are some situations where Livewire may not be SEO friendly (depending on how you’re loading the initial data you want to display), but if you’re rendering data immediately, it’s automatically SEO friendly.

Compare this to Inertia, which requires you to specifically set up server-side rendering. It’s an easy process with Inertia, but server-side rendered SPAs can be a nightmare due to their separate mechanisms required for hydrating. You may end up with hydration errors when using plugins or with your own code, if you’re not careful.

7. You just need to sprinkle in reactivity

If you’re happy with your current Laravel application but just need to sprinkle in reactivity, Livewire is perfect for this. It’s feasible to have the majority of your Laravel application running without Livewire and a small percentage of your application using tiny Livewire components to do specific things.

There’s no huge setup required for Livewire or any modification to the structure of a standard Laravel application, so you’re able to quickly install it at any point without it affecting anything.

When to use Inertia

How Inertia works

Again, let’s take a moment to explain how Inertia works before we dive into why you might want to use it.

Inertia works more like a true SPA. It combines Laravel (or another supported framework) with something like Vue (or, once again, another supported framework) into a monorepo.

This means you’re effectively building a separate API and client, but they’re incredibly tightly coupled to each other. And that’s not bad — working with Inertia allows you to develop the traditional SPA much more quickly because you’re passing data directly from your controllers to your Vue (or other framework) pages.

Imagine taking an API and a client and squashing them together to interact seamlessly.

Once again, this is a simplified explanation (Inertia is also incredibly powerful), but hopefully, this helps you understand how it works.

Let’s dive into why you may choose Inertia.

1. If you want to use Vue, React or Svelte

Inertia supports Vue, React and Svelte. It goes without saying that if you’re comfortable with any of these and want to continue building applications with them... Inertia is a great choice.

If you’re traditionally a front-end developer and are just dabbling in building full-stack applications, you may be faster and feel more comfortable building applications with Inertia.

2. You need a ‘true’ SPA experience

Because Inetia applications run a complete client-side framework, you’ll get a ‘true’ SPA experience, similar to if you were building a separate API and client. This means you can work heavily with JavaScript and have complete control over the client-side with practically no limits to what you’d experience with separate projects.

3. You need specific plugins/components only available for front-end frameworks

The Vue, React, and Svelte ecosystems are huge, so there are plenty of plugins and components specifically designed for these frameworks. If you choose Inertia, you’re also opting into this ecosystem and have access to anything you’d usually use for a separate client project.

There may be a few differences in how specific plugins are used if they consume API data or make calls to an API (e.g. a file upload plugin) since Inertia’s data is fed from your controllers. But it’s perfectly possible to adapt most plugins to work with Inertia.

4. You like building ‘APIs’

While you won’t be building a traditional API with Inertia, you’ll still partly feel like you are. Controllers in your Laravel application (or other supported framework) act as your API endpoints, which also return a response to render your client-side pages. This means you can structure your data similarly to an API (for example, using API Resources in Laravel).

If you like the familiarity of building an API and want to stick with that feeling, Inertia would work better for you.

5. You don’t mind maintaining a monorepo

With Inertia, your server and client code live in the same codebase, by design. If you’re a solo developer, it’s an easy decision. For a larger team with developers who specialise between frontend and backend, it may be a little more complicated to work within a monorepo without a clearly defined boundary between the API and client.

This isn’t a downside of Inertia by any means, but it’s something to consider for larger teams and their preferences.

I find myself incredibly productive in Inertia because it’s easier for me to maintain a single repository than to switch between two entirely separate projects.

6. If you may need to split up your client/API at some point

Ok, so it’s probably very rare, but if you were using Inertia and needed to split out the codebase into a separate API and client in the future, Inertia would make this much easier than if you had a Livewire project. With Livewire, it would pretty much be a full rebuild of the application from scratch, whereas an Inertia project would be a case of time just spent tweaking how you return data from the server and fetch it from the client.

I don’t know any cases where this has needed to happen. Still, as a company grows and needs to eventually serve different platforms (a mobile app, for example) or has a larger team, this may be a better option.

Either way, there’s nothing stopping you from building a totally separate API to power other clients with either Livewire or Inertia!

Summary

It’s difficult to choose because Livewire and Inertia make it incredibly easy and fun to build applications in Laravel. If you’re a solo developer working on a project, choose a stack based on what you think will make you most productive and which one you’ll enjoy working with more. Livewire tends to be faster to build with, and Inertia offers the flexibility of being able to choose a front-end framework that you may already be familiar with. Despite how large your application grows, both are as easy as each other to maintain.

The advice I usually give, aside from the reasons I’ve written here, is this — play around with both and choose the one you enjoy working with the most. For teams, that’s a little more complicated.

The good news is that both Inertia and Livewire are considered first-party to Laravel and will receive ongoing support, so there’s no need to worry about which one will stick around.

You’ll be super productive in either solution. Enjoy building!

Resources

If you want to learn either Inertia or Livewire, we have plenty of courses on both!

You’ll find practical Inertia courses and Livewire courses right here on Codecourse, helping you build real-world skills that you can apply to your own applications.