I consider Laravel to be a framework. Boilerplates are another wrapper on top of frameworks . For example, there is Laravel Spark which is a boilerplate on top of Laravel. I tried it and it was so bloated and complex to actually change things for your own use case, I dropped it. Many more like that in other ecosystems. Not saying it doesn't work for others but nowadays there are too many people selling boilerplates who have never really built production grade application for at least a decade.