The PHP architecture layer that wires your system together — so you build features, not infrastructure
From #[CommandHandler] on day one to sagas, orchestrators, event sourcing, outbox, and distributed messaging at scale — one package, same codebase, no forced migrations between growth stages.
Works on the Laravel or Symfony you already run · Install with Composer · Configure with PHP attributes
Enterprise patterns with the simplicity of PHP attributes
// Asynchronous command handler — that's the entire setup
#[Asynchronous('orders')]
#[CommandHandler]
public function placeOrder(PlaceOrder $command): void
{
$order = Order::create($command->orderId, $command->items);
$this->orderRepository->save($order);
}
// Ecotone handles the rest:
// ✓ Async execution via RabbitMQ / Kafka / SQS / DBAL
// ✓ Automatic retries on failure
// ✓ Dead letter queue if all retries fail
// ✓ Message tracing and correlationYour framework stays.
Your ORM, queues, and deploy stay too.
Ecotone is a Composer package that adds architecture on top of what you already run. Business logic as POPOs, messaging topology as attributes, your existing Laravel, Symfony, or PSR-11 container underneath.
Same classes. Same codebase.
No forced migration between stages.
Each new stage is a new attribute, not a new library. The more advanced your needs get — interceptors, sagas, orchestration, event sourcing, multi-tenancy, PII encryption — the more Ecotone already has built in, on the same code.
- #[CommandHandler]
- #[QueryHandler]
- #[EventHandler]
- #[Aggregate]
- #[Identifier]
Familiar handlers.
CQRS buses and aggregates, auto-wired from attributes. Five-minute start.
- #[Asynchronous]
- #[Deduplicated]
- #[Scheduled]
- #[Repository]
- #[BusinessMethod]
Async & persistence.
Move work off the request cycle, and reach data through repositories and business-method interfaces — all declarative.
- #[Before]
- #[Around]
- #[Priority]
- #[Delayed]
- #[TimeToLive]
Intercept & tune delivery.
Cross-cutting concerns and delivery control — interceptors, priority, delays, time-to-live — declaratively.
- #[Saga]
- #[EventSourcingSaga]
- #[InternalHandler]
- #[Orchestrator] ✦
- #[OrchestratorGateway] ✦
Long-running processes.
Sagas and orchestrators coordinate multi-step business flows, outbox-consistent.
- #[EventSourcingAggregate]
- #[Projection]
- #[Distributed] ✦
- #[MultiTenantConnection]
- #[Router]
Event sourcing & distribution.
Replayable aggregates, projections, cross-service messaging, and per-tenant connections — on the same code.
- #[Streaming] ✦
- #[Partitioned] ✦
- #[Sensitive] ✦
- #[WithEncryptionKey] ✦
- #[KafkaConsumer] ✦
Scale & protect.
Streaming and partitioned projections plus end-to-end PII encryption — Enterprise capabilities, same model.
✦ Enterprise capability — included with an Enterprise licence
Every other PHP alternative forces you to re-decide architecture at each column break — swap libraries, add glue, or stitch together a multi-package stack. No other single PHP package spans the full set of growth stages.
Every other PHP choice
commits to a ceiling on day one.
Beyond the ceiling lies integration work: stitch another library, write custom glue, or rewrite. Pick the category that matches your need — each comparison shows the competitors, their ceilings, and how Ecotone differs.
Durable Workflows
vs Temporal PHP SDK · Durable Workflow (formerly Laravel Workflow) · Symfony Messenger alone · Laravel Queues / Horizon
See comparison →
Event Sourcing
vs Spatie laravel-event-sourcing · EventSauce · Patchlevel event-sourcing
See comparison →
Asynchronous Communication
vs Symfony Messenger alone · Laravel Queues / Horizon
See comparison →
Orchestration Layer
vs Temporal PHP SDK · Durable Workflow (formerly Laravel Workflow) · Symfony Messenger alone
See comparison →
Microservices
vs Symfony Messenger alone · Laravel Queues / Horizon
See comparison →
Domain-Driven Design
vs Spatie laravel-event-sourcing · EventSauce · Patchlevel event-sourcing
See comparison →
Composable with alternatives. Complete standalone.
Ecotone doesn't have to be the entire stack. It composes with the other libraries above when a team already has a preferred tool for one layer:
- Ecotone as the orchestration, saga, and outbox layer — delegating long-running cross-language durable workflows to Temporal.
- Ecotone as the CQRS, workflows, and asynchronous communication layer — delegating event sourcing to EventSauce, Patchlevel, Spatie laravel-event-sourcing, or your own ES library.
- Ecotone as the Event Sourcing layer — you bring message handlers on Symfony Messenger (or your bus of choice); Ecotone persists the events and provides scalable (partitioned + streaming) projections.
Ecotone is the only toolkit on this list that runs fully standalone. Every other option requires you to integrate something for the layers it does not cover. Ecotone covers every layer itself when you want it to, and composes with alternatives when you prefer a specific tool for one piece.
Every pattern your domain will need — on one codebase
CQRS, event sourcing, sagas, outbox, EIP routing, multi-tenancy, distributed bus — all attribute-driven, all on the same messaging foundation.
Durable Workflows in Plain PHP
Crash-resistant multi-step processes on your existing database and broker. Sagas, orchestrators, chained workflows, outbox, and #[Delayed] timeouts — plain PHP attributes, no separate workflow service, no replay-deterministic DSL.
Reliable Messaging on Any Broker
RabbitMQ, Kafka, SQS, Redis, DBAL outbox. Move handlers to async with one attribute. CombinedMessageChannel writes the message in the same DBAL transaction as the business state, then dispatches execution to the broker. Atomic. Transports swap without code changes.
Resilience Defaults
Transactional outbox, DBAL dead-letter queue with replay, retries with exponential backoff, deduplication, OpenTelemetry on every handler — default behaviour, not assembly required.
Per-handler Failure Isolation
A copy of the message is dispatched to every handler. Each retries independently, fails independently — no shared envelope, no sibling re-runs. One failing subscriber doesn't abort the others.
Sagas & Workflows
Stateful long-running processes with compensation. Handler-chaining workflows for stateless pipelines. Saga timeouts in one #[Delayed] attribute. All declarative, all attribute-driven.
CQRS & Handlers
Command, query, and event bus — all auto-wired from your attributes. No registration, no factory classes, no container bindings.
Event Sourcing & Projections
Store events, not state. Aggregates, projections, replay, snapshotting. Partitioned + streaming projections so rebuilds parallelize across workers and catch up in real time — no single-process bottleneck.
Composable EIP Messaging
Pipe handlers together. Route by payload or headers. Split one message into many. Filter, enrich, transform — all as attributes, no glue code.
Custom Buses per Use Case
Extend CommandBus into use-case-specific interfaces. Attach retry, DLQ, and dedup as attributes directly on the interface declaration.
Multi-tenant Messaging
Tenant-isolated event streams, tenant-routed message channels, priority routing by customer status. Multi-tenancy as a topology property, not a WHERE clause.
Endpoint-ID Routing
Rename classes, move handlers, refactor namespaces — messages still route correctly. The endpoint ID is the contract; FQCN is not on the wire.
Compose Patterns Without Glue
Aggregate publishes event. Saga subscribes by attribute. Projection subscribes by attribute. Async handler subscribes by attribute. The attribute is the wiring.
Framework-portable Business Code
Same aggregates, handlers, sagas, and projections run on Laravel, Symfony, or any PSR-11 container. Hedge against framework changes over a decade.
End-to-end PII Protection
One #[Sensitive] attribute encrypts a field in the event store, on the wire over RabbitMQ / SQS / Redis / Kafka / DBAL outbox, and in your structured logs — because all serialization flows through one shared conversion pipeline.
Projections That Emit Events
A projection can emit a downstream event the moment it applies a change — sagas, event handlers, and other projections subscribe via the normal #[EventHandler]. Rebuild a projection? Emission is automatically suppressed, so downstream consumers aren't flooded with duplicate historical events while the read model catches up.
Runs on the Brokers You Already Have
First-party packages for RabbitMQ, Kafka, SQS, Redis, and DBAL. Ecotone fits your existing stack — no new cluster to operate, no migration of your message infrastructure.
Correlation & Causation, Automatic
Correlation IDs and parent-message IDs propagate from command to every emitted event without middleware. Your OpenTelemetry spans stitch themselves end-to-end — no bundle to install, no stamps to remember.
Blue-Green Projection Rebuild
Rebuild a projection on a new version in parallel — concurrent async backfill partitioned by aggregate ID scales rebuilds to millions of events across N workers. The live projection keeps serving queries until the atomic flip.
Self-Healing Projections
Projections are trigger-based: on every run they read from the Event Store at their last committed position. Crash at event #42? Fix the bug, deploy, and the projection catches up automatically — no manual reset, no backfill script.
What Ecotone brings to your stack
Laravel handles HTTP beautifully. But the moment you need event sourcing, sagas, or multi-step workflows — you're stitching packages together. Ecotone gives you one coherent toolkit: aggregates, projections, outbox, and more — all attribute-driven, all testable in-process, all running on the Laravel queues you already have.
Trusted in regulated
and high-stakes production
The features on the capability matrix are not hypothetical. They run in systems where failure is either regulated, expensive, or public.
Payment gateways
Where retried handlers cannot double-charge, and the outbox must guarantee that every committed transaction produces exactly one downstream message.
Credit card systems
Where transaction loss is catastrophic, and every state change must be auditable and replayable.
Certification authorities
Whose entire business depends on reconstructible, tamper-evident audit trails; the event log is the audit log.
E-commerce platforms
Orchestrating order → payment → fulfillment → notification as declarative sagas with compensation.
Public transportation subscription systems
Managing nationwide transit subscriptions (create, renew, terminate) with distributed bus integration to Java and PHP services over Kafka.
Two-sided marketplaces
Coordinating customer orders, provider subscriptions, lead distribution, and B2B enterprise partnerships on one event-driven backbone.
One testing model for every flow
Your tests run through the same messaging pipeline as production — bus routing, async channels, event propagation — all in one process. Send a message, run the flow, assert the result. The test shape never changes.
Extract exactly the flow you care about and test it in isolation:
// Test a specific flow in isolation — only the services you need
$ecotone = EcotoneLite::bootstrapFlowTesting([OrderService::class]);
$ecotone->sendCommand(new PlaceOrder('order-1'));
$this->assertEquals('placed', $ecotone->sendQueryWithRouting('order.getStatus', 'order-1'));Bring in async handlers, enable an in-memory channel, and verify the full flow:
// Test the full async flow — in-memory channel, same process
$notifier = new InMemoryNotificationSender();
$ecotone = EcotoneLite::bootstrapFlowTesting(
[OrderService::class, NotificationService::class],
[NotificationSender::class => $notifier],
enableAsynchronousProcessing: [
SimpleMessageChannelBuilder::createQueueChannel('notifications')
]
);
$ecotone
->sendCommand(new PlaceOrder('order-1'))
->run('notifications');
$this->assertEquals(['order-1'], $notifier->getSentOrderConfirmations());Swap the in-memory channel for DBAL, RabbitMQ, or Kafka in production — the test stays the same. Ecotone runs the consumer in-process, so switching transports never changes how you test.
Enterprise Patterns Across Ecosystems
Every mature platform has this. Now PHP does too.
| Ecosystem | Framework | Enterprise Patterns | CQRS | Event Sourcing | Workflows | Messaging |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Java | Spring | Axon Framework | ||||
| .NET | ASP.NET | NServiceBus / MassTransit | ||||
| PHP | Laravel / Symfony | Ecotone |
No breaking changes across major versions
Ecotone follows a stability commitment — your business code keeps working across releases, so upgrades are safe to apply.
See the changelog →Commercial support, Support Agreements, and workshops
Available for teams running Ecotone in production. Consulting, onboarding workshops, and Support Agreements with guaranteed response.
Explore Support Agreement →Built for AI-assisted development
Declarative configuration that any coding agent can follow and reproduce. Testing support that lets it verify even the most advanced flows. Less guessing, no hallucinating — just confident iteration.
Less context, less tokens
Declarative attributes mean less infrastructure code to feed into the AI's context window and less boilerplate to generate. Smaller input and output means lower cost, faster iteration and more accurate results.
Agentic Skills
Ready-to-use skills that teach any coding agent how to correctly write handlers, aggregates, sagas, projections, and tests. Your AI generates idiomatic Ecotone code from the start.
MCP & llms.txt
Direct documentation access for AI assistants via Model Context Protocol. Works with Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf, GitHub Copilot, and others.
AI-testable async
The same straightforward test model applies to async flows. Your coding agent writes tests that run the real pipeline — no special setup to guess at.
Ready to Get Started?
Add Ecotone to your existing Laravel or Symfony project in minutes.
composer require ecotone/laravel
