CakePHP.
One project. I want to be exact about that, because CakePHP is a framework people either have never touched or are quietly stuck on, and both deserve a straight answer. Mine was a construction ERP for a Finnish company, built with a team of five — a real system with real invoicing, not a demo. I would not start anything new on CakePHP today. If you are running one, though, you are looking for someone who has actually shipped one, and there are not many of us.
Convention over configuration
CakePHP took this seriously before most of PHP did. A codebase that follows the conventions is predictable to navigate, even years later and even when you did not write it.
A genuinely strong ORM
The table and entity model handles complicated relational work well. An ERP is mostly joins and edge cases, and the ORM held up under it.
Built for business software
Forms, validation, and data integrity are where CakePHP is strongest — which is precisely what back-office systems are made of.
Stable and unexciting
It changes slowly. For a system whose job is to invoice correctly every month, that is a feature rather than a complaint.
It works, it matters, and the people who built it have gone. I have shipped one end to end, so I can read yours without billing you for the education.
The ERP I built lived or died on invoicing and e-signature integrations. That work — third-party APIs that must not silently fail — is the same in any framework.
The ORM and conventions differ more than CodeIgniter does, so it is more work and I will not pretend otherwise. It is still incremental, and it is still worth it if the system is growing.
I would not begin a new project on CakePHP in 2026. The ecosystem is small, the hiring pool is smaller, and nothing it does well is something Laravel does not do better. Start on Laravel.
CakePHP is one project in a career, not a specialism, and the page says so. What it gives you is narrow and useful: someone who has carried a CakePHP system through production and integrations, and who will tell you honestly whether to maintain it or move it.
One project — a Finnish construction ERP, with a team of five. That is the honest number. It was a substantial system rather than a small site, but it is one, and you should weigh it as one.
Yes. Having shipped one, I know the conventions, the ORM, and where these codebases usually hurt. Most maintenance work is reading carefully and changing narrowly, and that transfers.
It depends on whether the system is still growing. Actively developed: yes, incrementally, and the sooner the cheaper. Stable and quiet: probably not — keep it patched and spend the money elsewhere.
In my work
One CakePHP project: a construction ERP for a Finnish client, built with a team of five — site planning, daily worker reports, offers generated from preset work plans, Netvisor invoicing, and Visma Sign e-signatures.