Laravel or Lumen

It is true that Lumen, as a micro-framework could be adapted to your project, but not because it is a micro-framework it might be better for you.

My experience using Lumen is quite short, but I tell you that when I installed it (just thinking that it would adapt well to a small project) and started using it, I quickly realized that it did not have many of the things that I have become used to using in Laravel. . Therefore, I did not feel comfortable. Before going down that path and trying to adapt, I decided to put it aside and use Laravel. In the end, I thought that adapting it to what I needed was going to give me more work than I thought.

Anyway, for your specific case, of creating a REST API system, I don’t think you have to worry about using Laravel, since in the latest versions they have done a lot of work to improve that aspect.

In fact, now in Laravel the API routes go through a different system than the web routes, so when running endpoints you will have less processing, since some of the things necessary to respond with HTML have been disabled in API routes. That is why I believe that today using Laravel and using Lumen does not have much difference, at least in terms of performance.

Since with Laravel you will have everything you need, I don’t really see a relevant advantage that would lead you to use Lumen instead of Laravel.