Laravel: Breeze, Fortify, and Jetstream

Laravel ships three official answers to “add login,” layered by how much you want handed to you.

Breeze installs actual view files and controllers into your project. You get working registration, login, password reset, and email verification, as code you own and can edit immediately.

composer require laravel/breeze --dev
php artisan breeze:install blade
npm install && npm run dev
php artisan migrate

Fortify implements the same authentication logic as a backend-only package, with no views included, meant for pairing with a custom frontend or an API.

composer require laravel/fortify
php artisan vendor:publish --provider="Laravel\Fortify\FortifyServiceProvider"
php artisan migrate

Jetstream builds on Fortify and adds a full application shell: team management, API tokens, two-factor authentication, and a choice of Livewire or Inertia-based frontend, aimed at SaaS products that need accounts and teams from day one.

composer require laravel/jetstream
php artisan jetstream:install livewire
npm install && npm run build
php artisan migrate

When to reach for each

Breeze for a straightforward app where you want to see and customize the auth code immediately. Fortify when the frontend is Inertia, a mobile app, or something custom that doesn’t want Breeze’s bundled views. Jetstream when the product itself is multi-tenant or team-based and you’d otherwise build that structure yourself anyway.

When it’s the wrong fit

A single-page marketing site with no real user accounts, or a project where WordPress’s built-in roles (see WordPress: Roles, Capabilities, and Application Passwords) already cover the need without adding a framework at all.

Under the hood: All three packages lean on Laravel’s Hash facade, which defaults to bcrypt or argon2id, both intentionally slow algorithms designed to make brute-forcing stolen password hashes impractical. You never call a hashing function directly; the framework’s authentication guard does it for you on every login attempt.