The PHP and Laravel ecosystem has had a quiet revolution in the past year. Where once you had to piece together raw HTTP calls to OpenAI's API and write your own retry logic, token counting, and provider-switching abstractions, you now have not one, not two, but three serious contenders for AI integration in your Laravel apps.
I've spent the last several months evaluating all three in real projects — and I want to give you the honest, side-by-side comparison I wish I'd had when I started.
The three tools in question are:
Inspector.dev / Neuron AI — a PHP-agnostic agentic framework backed by the Inspector monitoring platform
Laravel AI SDK (laravel/ai) — Taylor Otwell's official, first-party SDK that shipped production-stable with Laravel 13
