Is Laravel to PHP, what Rails is to Ruby?

I am not sure if the comparison can be done on the basis of features, but yes, if you wish to compare what they are. Both of them are application development frameworks. Nowadays, I am learning RoR and I have worked with Laravel for quite sometime now. The features offered by both of them are great and they can be easily picked up by anyone who has decent experience with the respective language. Personally, I am a big supporter of Laravel because of the ease and DRYness with which you can develop your application.

Sort of, but different.  Before Rails came out, Ruby was more of a language people played around in than used on a day-to-day basis.  Most of the tutorials and books were about how to automate command line tasks using Ruby.  Short, simple stuff, not full-blown applications like Capistrano or Chef.When Rails came out, Ruby gained tremendous popularity and became baked into other components.  Put another way, before Rails, most people would have used Python for most tasks.  After Rails, Ruby became more popular as a go-to language.   Rails also pioneered interest in SASS, CoffeeScript, and YAML.  Rails is strongly opinionated about best-practices and tightly enforced them from the start, making it easy to work in teams on a project because you didn't have to keep reinventing the wheel and new where everything was and what it was going to do.PHP's history is a bit more complex.  PHP lacked several of the key features that made Rails a great templating engine, specifically, Bundler is the blessing/curse of Ruby.  PHP had PEAR, and I've yet to hear anyone say something good about it.  PEAR installed dependencies globally, had no config file to hand off, and no structure.  So people would typically install PEAR dependencies, then dump them into their project.  It was ugly.Additionally, there were no standards in the community.  Every framework would reinvent the wheel and make their own system, which was incompatible with other systems.  Ruby had the nice advantage that you could switch out gems to suit your needs and not (theoretically) break the system.  I have to say theoretically because Ruby has always been fragile to me when it comes to updating anything.  There's a joke, "Rails in 24 hours.  Hours 1 - 16, getting Bundle install to work."  Once you got past that though, you could up and run your Rails environment with a single command.  PHP never had that until Composer came along.  Then the PHP-FIG (Framework Interoperability Group) came out with recommendations on how to make different framework components work together.  Then PHP evolved to include Traits, Generators, Iterators, namespaces, and a whole host of other features.So whereas I would say that Rails pioneered best practices and ignited interest in Ruby, Laravel is more the recipient of evolved best-practices and because it came out after PHP 5.3, it was able to take advantage of all these best practices.  It shows off the best of PHP, including new features like Laravel Elixir to automate minification, concatenation, compiling SASS and LESS, etc.  Given how pioneering Rails was, I can't put them on the same level. I can say that Laravel is in my opinion, one of the best frameworks written in any language.

Having used both, I think the comparison doesn't really work. People bring up Laravel in comparison to Rails a lot, and there are some design decisions that are very similar, but Rails is vastly larger and more complex. It does much more for you, right out of the box; some people favor smaller frameworks, but for basic productivity purposes, it's nice to use an environment that handles the stuff you should be doing anyway (minifying and concatenating your JS and CSS, CSS preprocessing, etc.). Further, even if Laravel were comparable to Rails, there's still the fact that you're working with PHP. PHP is slower, clumsier, less expressive, and less readable than Ruby, and that makes a difference in your day-to-day life. Rails has a well-deserved reputation for allowing rapid development; in my experience, companies that work in PHP simply content themselves with a vastly slower development cycle, which ultimately costs a lot of money.

Compared to Ruby, PHP have a number of frameworks to work on. Ruby on rails is prominent framework used with Ruby. I think most of them use Ruby with rails. . Laravel is a different story. It is agile, robust and effective. It may come in top position for most favourable php framework in few years