In a post on masterzendframework.com Matthew Setter shares his experiences with building the same application in both Laravel and Zend Expression.

The reason being, is that you can't give a straight yes or no answer. It's like asking: is desktop Linux as easy as Windows? The presumption there is that you want to do exactly the same thing in Linux as you can with Windows.

Well, if you wanted the exact same experience on Linux, as you get with Windows, then use Windows! As you're working with two different systems, two different approaches to solving the same challenge, then the end result may be the same — but how they work will naturally be different.

So it is with Laravel and Zend Expressive. They're two exceptional PHP frameworks which can be used to create similar applications. Yet they were designed with different preconceptions about how an application's should be put together. They were designed for different developer mindsets. And the list goes on.

So, whilst I was able to create the same application, roughly about the same size, the way they were developed was different.

http://www.masterzendframework.com/zend-expressive-or-laravel/

I'm currently perfectly happy in the Laravel ecosystem, so I won't be making a switch soon. But I like to keep an eye out on how other frameworks and communities are doing things to learn from that.