Livewire 4 vs Inertia 3: choosing a Laravel 13 frontend stack

Choose Livewire 4 if your team is mainly PHP developers building forms, dashboards and admin-heavy apps, and you want to stay in Blade. Choose Inertia 3 if you want a React, Vue or Svelte front end, rich client-side interactions or a team of JavaScript developers, while keeping Laravel routing, controllers and authentication. Both are first-party options in the Laravel 13 starter kits, and neither needs a separate API.

This comparison is based on the Laravel 13.x frontend and starter kit documentation, the Livewire 4 and Inertia 3 upgrade guides and package releases as of 10 October 2026, when the latest versions were Livewire 4.4.7 and inertia-laravel 3.5.1.

How each one works

Livewire: components that run on the server

A Livewire component is a PHP class plus a Blade view. Its public properties are the state, its methods are actions, and directives such as wire:click and wire:model connect the HTML to them. When the user clicks, Livewire sends a request, runs the method on the server, re-renders the component and patches the DOM. In Livewire 4 the default is a single-file component, with PHP and Blade together, as in this example from the Laravel 13 documentation:

<?php

use Livewire\Component;

new class extends Component
{
    public $count = 0;

    public function increment()
    {
        $this->count++;
    }
};
?>

<div>
    <button wire:click="increment">+</button>
    <h1>{{ $count }}</h1>
</div>

You create components with php artisan make:livewire create-post (add --mfc for a multi-file component) and route full-page components with Route::livewire('/dashboard', 'pages::dashboard'), which Livewire 4 now calls the preferred method. Alpine.js handles small client-only behaviour such as opening a dropdown.

Inertia: server routing, client rendering

With Inertia, you write normal Laravel routes and controllers, but instead of returning a Blade view you return a page component name and its props:

use App\Models\User;
use Inertia\Inertia;
use Inertia\Response;

class UserController extends Controller
{
    public function show(User $user): Response
    {
        return Inertia::render('users/show', [
            'user' => $user->only(['id', 'name', 'email']),
        ]);
    }
}

The first visit returns HTML; later navigation fetches JSON and swaps the React, Vue or Svelte page in the browser, so the app behaves like a single-page application without client-side routing or a token-based API. Laravel sessions, middleware, validation and authorization work as usual.

What is new in each version

Islands answer a long-standing Livewire complaint: a click in one corner of a large component re-rendered all of it. Now you can isolate that region:

<div>
    @island
        <div>
            Revenue: {{ $this->revenue }}
            <button type="button" wire:click="$refresh">Refresh</button>
        </div>
    @endisland
</div>

Inertia's optimistic updates answer the equivalent complaint on its side, where every like or toggle waited for the server:

import { router } from '@inertiajs/react'

router.optimistic((props) => ({
    post: {
        ...props.post,
        likes: props.post.likes + 1,
    },
})).post(`/posts/${post.id}/like`)

Side-by-side comparison

Performance and security trade-offs

Livewire's model is simple but chatty. Each interaction is a round trip, and public properties are sent to the browser and back, so large public arrays slow every request and anything in a public property is visible to the user. Keep public state small, load heavy data in computed properties, and authorise inside every action, because a user can call any public method. Islands, lazy loading and async actions in version 4 reduce how much is re-rendered and how long users wait.

Inertia's cost is mostly up front: you ship and maintain a JavaScript bundle, a build step and, for SEO-sensitive pages, an SSR process. After the first load, navigation is fast and interactions can be instant. The security rule is the same as any SPA: every prop you pass to Inertia::render ends up in the page, so pass explicit fields (as with only() above) or API resources rather than whole models.

Testing each stack

Both stacks test well from PHP. A Livewire feature test drives the component directly:

use App\Livewire\Counter;
use Livewire\Livewire;

it('increments the counter', function () {
    Livewire::test(Counter::class)
        ->call('increment')
        ->assertSet('count', 1);
});

An Inertia test checks the component name and props the controller returns:

use App\Models\User;
use Inertia\Testing\AssertableInertia as Assert;

it('shows a user', function () {
    $user = User::factory()->create();

    $this->actingAs($user)
        ->get("/users/{$user->id}")
        ->assertInertia(fn (Assert $page) => $page
            ->component('users/show')
            ->where('user.id', $user->id)
        );
});

Inertia apps usually also need JavaScript component tests or browser tests for client behaviour, which is extra tooling to maintain.

Team fit and long-term cost

The technical differences matter less than who will maintain the code. A Livewire app has one language, one set of conventions and one dependency tree managed by Composer, plus a small amount of Alpine.js. That suits small teams and agencies where every developer works across the whole stack.

An Inertia app has two ecosystems. You gain access to the much larger npm component market and to front-end developers who already know React or Vue, but you also take on npm upgrades, a TypeScript build, front-end linting and major-version migrations on both sides. Inertia 3 itself required React 19 and Svelte 5, so upgrades on one side can force upgrades on the other. Budget for that work when you estimate the project.

Which should you choose?

• Choose Livewire 4 for internal tools, SaaS back offices, CRUD-heavy products, content sites with interactive pieces, and teams of Laravel developers who do not want a second language in the stack.
• Choose Inertia 3 for products with complex client-side state, design systems already built in React or Vue, teams with front-end specialists, or plans to share components with a separate JavaScript app.
• Choose neither if you need a public API for mobile apps or third parties as the main product: build a Laravel API with Sanctum and a separate client instead.

Gotchas and what to do next

• Upgrading Livewire 3 apps: the update endpoint moved from /livewire/ to /livewire-{hash}/, so check firewall and CDN rules; wire:model now ignores child element events unless you add .deep; Volt components need migrating.
• Upgrading Inertia 2 apps: Axios, qs and lodash-es are no longer bundled, React 18 and Svelte 4 are no longer supported, and LazyProp is replaced by Inertia::optional(). Republish the config.
• Do not mix casually. Running both in one app is possible but doubles your conventions; pick one per product area.

The fastest way to decide is to build the same small feature, such as a filterable table with an edit modal, in both starter kits (laravel new prompts for one) and judge which code your team would rather maintain in two years.