140 routes. Eight queue workers. Hiring senior PHP got hard. Two backend engineers left, and the team wanted to write React and Node end to end. Laravel 6 was past end of life, and a failed Laravel 10 upgrade attempt burned 6 weeks.
Migration Laravel to MERN migration · PHP to Node + React · UK
Laravel to MERN migration for the team that wants one language. across frontend, backend, and the queue.
UK SaaS founders and product teams move off PHP, Blade, and Eloquent onto Node.js + Express + React + MongoDB — surface by surface, with parity testing and no big-bang switch.
6Laravel → MERN migrations shipped
0big-bang switches, ever
5-dayfixed-scope migration audit
(Why founders + CTOs migrate now)
You don’t need to leave Laravel. You need to leave the version of Laravel that’s costing you growth.
One language across frontend, backend, queue, and ops scripts. Hiring gets simpler. Context switches end. We move you surface by surface, so risk stays bounded from week one.
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The founder this page is for140 routes · 8 queue workers · 6 weeks burned
Riya runs a UK B2B SaaS. Six years of Laravel 6. Then the Laravel 10 upgrade failed.
Fourteen-week staged migration. Strangler-fig pattern. Auth ported to Node.js and Clerk first. Read paths next. Write paths last. Eloquent models translated to Mongoose. Horizon replaced by BullMQ and Bull Board. Cutover happened surface by surface across nine weeks.
Zero downtime on any path. This page is for the founder or CTO who has decided the migration is happening, and wants it to land without taking the business down.
The migration risk. How we close it before cutover.
We don’t pretend migrations are safe. We make the risks legible and mitigated, in writing, before a single line of production code changes.
- 01
“Will every Laravel route and guard still behave on Express?”
Export the route table, reproduce with tests. Laravel routes, middleware, and auth guards map 1:1 to Express plus middleware. We reproduce the table with tests before a single surface flips.
- 02
“Our Eloquent relations won’t map cleanly to MongoDB.”
Postgres + Prisma, or Mongo + Mongoose. hasMany, belongsToMany, and polymorphic relations get a deliberate target. Postgres plus Prisma where relations are core, Mongo plus Mongoose where document shape wins.
- 03
“Horizon has tooling Node doesn’t match out of the box.”
BullMQ + Bull Board, or AWS SQS + Lambda. Most cases move to BullMQ plus Bull Board. We make every job idempotent before the queue moves, so retries don’t create ghosts.
- 04
“We can’t log everyone out the day we cut over.”
JWT, Clerk, or Auth0, rebuilt as the first cut. Auth migrates with a session bridge so users stay logged in. We rebuild auth first so sessions migrate cleanly.
- 05
“How do we know the new screen renders the same as the old one?”
Visual parity tests + per-page screenshot diffing. Blade loops, conditionals, partials, and layouts rebuild as React components with an accessibility audit. Per-page screenshot diffing runs during cutover.
- 06
“Half our file handling runs through the Storage facade.”
Direct S3 SDK + image processing, URLs preserved. Storage facade calls and Filesystem disks port to the direct S3 SDK plus sharp. Every existing URL keeps working.
- 07
“Our validation rules live in dozens of Form Request classes.”
Zod or Joi server-side, error messages preserved. Laravel Form Request rules port to Zod or Joi. Client validation is mirrored. The error copy your users already know stays the same.
- 08
“Can’t we just rewrite it all and flip the switch one weekend?”
Strangler-fig, route table by route table. Big-bang cutover on a six-year Laravel estate fails. Each surface ships independently, and rollback is per surface, not per system.
Laravel modernisation services · the honest case
Four reasons the move is worth it. And the risk bounded per surface.
We don’t pretend a Laravel to Node migration is free. Here’s what you gain, named plainly, against what scares CTOs about the move.
One language, end to end
Frontend, backend, queue, and ops scripts all in TypeScript. Your next senior hire reads the whole stack on day one. Context switching ends.
A bigger hiring pool
London has thousands more Node engineers than senior Laravel ones. After Riya’s migration, her hiring pool was three times larger. Onboarding stopped hurting.
Queue observability, kept
You don’t lose Horizon-grade insight. BullMQ plus Bull Board, or AWS SQS plus Lambda, often reads cleaner at scale than what you had.
Risk bounded per surface
We never flip everything at once. Auth first, or read-only first, then writes. Rollback is per surface, not per system, so a bad day costs you one route, not the business.
The stack we migrate you to.
We default to MERN plus Python plus AWS. We’re comfortable on GCP, Azure, Cloudflare, DigitalOcean, Vercel, and Fly.io where your team has a constraint or a relationship.
T1
Default MERN target
where we landNode.js + ExpressReact + Next.jsTypeScriptMongoDB + MongoosePostgreSQL + PrismaBullMQClerk / Auth0StripeResendMixpanelTailwindJest + Playwright
T2
Migration-specific tooling
for the move itselfPHP CLI export scriptsLaravel Tinker probesBull BoardMongoose MigratorPrisma MigratePercy / Chromatic diffZod / Joi
T3
Infra, observability, safety net
AWS-defaultAWSRDS / DocumentDBAWS LambdaSQS / EventBridgeS3 + CloudFrontSecrets ManagerKubernetes (EKS)RedisTerraformDatadogSentryCloudflare
How a Laravel to MERN migration runs
Five stages, each one a deliverable.
No mystery box. Each stage is fixed-scope, ends with something you can show your board, and you decide whether to continue at every boundary. Strangler-fig throughout, never a big bang.
14 wks
Staged migration
0
Downtime on any path
“Auth first, then reads, then writes. Cutover happened surface by surface across nine weeks. We never had a minute of downtime, and our hiring pool tripled.”
001
5-day migration audit
Two senior engineers read your Laravel codebase, data, and infra. A 20 to 30 page audit pack, risk matrix, and fixed quote. £8K fixed, no build commitment.
002
Auth ported first
We rebuild auth on Clerk or Auth0 as the first cut, with a session bridge so users stay logged in through the transition. Nothing else flips until auth is solid.
003
Read paths, then writes
Read-only surfaces flip behind a feature flag, write paths flip last. Eloquent models translate to Mongoose or Prisma. Rollback is per surface, not per system.
004
Queue and parity tests
Horizon replaced by BullMQ and Bull Board, every job made idempotent first. Blade rebuilt as React with per-page screenshot diffing during cutover.
005
Stabilise and decommission
We fix what only production traffic surfaces, hand over, and decommission the old Laravel estate on a schedule you sign off. From £45K fixed scope.
Teams who’ve moved Laravel to MERN
Real lines from the migrations we’ve shipped, on the things that kept them up at night.
100%
would refer us
Auth first, then reads, then writes. We never had a minute of downtime, and our hiring pool tripled.
Real questions from the audit call before you sign
Pain-first, soft-second. No marketing varnish.
Depends on your model. If relations are core, with joins, foreign keys, and ACID transactions across tables, we point a Laravel to Node migration at PostgreSQL plus Prisma. If document shape wins, with variable schemas, embedded data, and denormalised reads, MongoDB plus Mongoose. We’ll recommend at the audit, with the reasoning written down so your team can challenge it.
10 to 20 weeks is typical. Surface count, queue complexity, custom packages, and database choice drive the scope. The 5-day migration audit gives you the real number for your estate, with a fixed quote attached. We don’t guess on a sales call.
No. Strangler-fig means surface by surface. Auth migrates with a session bridge so users stay logged in. Read paths flip behind a feature flag. Write paths flip last. Rollback is per surface. The old system stays read-only for 60 days as a safety net.
Cashier moves to the Stripe SDK direct or the Stripe Billing portal. Scout moves to Algolia or Typesense. Socialite moves to NextAuth or Clerk social. We map every package at the audit so there are no surprises mid-sprint.
Yes. The strangler-fig pattern allows a hybrid steady state. Some teams keep Laravel for back-office or admin while moving customer-facing surfaces to MERN first. We’ll recommend the line at the audit, based on where your hiring pain and your growth actually are.
An in-place Laravel 10 upgrade fights the framework and your deadlines at once. A Laravel to Node migration runs in parallel, so your current system keeps serving customers while the MERN target is built and dry-run against a prod data clone. Nothing customer-facing changes until a planned cutover window, and that window is rehearsed and reversible.
Every migration has two senior engineers paired, not one. Every decision goes into an ADR the same day. Mohit reviews every PR. If one engineer leaves, the other has full context the next morning. In seven years, two engineers have left mid-project. Both handovers were inside 48 hours.
30-day walk-away both ways. Phase billing, so you’re never more than one phase at risk. UK VAT registered, listed on Companies House, shipping since 2019. The audit is fixed at £8K, and you can stop after it with the audit pack and quote in hand and owe nothing more.
In context
Inside the work.
A look at the kind of laravel to mern migration surface we hand over — real screens, real data, documented and yours from day one.
Five lines. That’s the brief.
Send your current Laravel estate (traffic, data size, integrations), why you want to migrate, and the deadline you’re working to. Mohit replies inside 24 hours with availability and the next 5-day audit slot.
What happens after the email lands
- < 24h
A personal reply.
Yes, no, or the deciding question. Straight to your inbox.
- Week 1
Audit week begins.
Risk matrix, target architecture, data migration plan, fixed quote.
- Cutover
Surface by surface.
Rehearsed rollback, old system read-only for 60 days, zero downtime per path.