1. It's for everyone
Programmers, Designers, Clients... There is something for everyone. Programmers who are already familiar with the Laravel framework will feel right at home in the structures and the core architecture, they may only miss Blade as templating engine, but Twig is at least as easy and convenient as Blade. Designers are delighted with the Monaco Editor (which powers Visual Studio Code) in the backend area and the bundling engine, which allows to write everything directly in SASS (or Less) and leave the rest to October. Clients will love the simplified interface to create static pages, menus and blog entries, designed to be at least as easy as WordPress. All of them provided by additional extensions, which are also developed by the core team.
2. It ain't too easy
As Einstein said "Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.". WordPress made the interface as well as the programming part way simpler as possible, allowing young developers to quickly achieve success writing a plugin or theme. A good thing at first, however, this leads also to dozens or hundreds of extensions which may add an important function, but are written so inexperienced that they should not be used in production. It's not a rumor, that many WordPress websites are vulnerable, not because of using WordPress itself, moreover because they use one or more plugins with highly important security vulnerabilities. Basic security flaws, such as XSS or SQL-Injections are still a thing within the WordPress community.
Of course, OctoberCMS can also be subject of poorly written extensions, but the entry barrier is a bit higher than with WordPress. I'm not saying that OctoberCMS and Laravel are really hard to learn and use, but definitely not as simple as WordPress. Additionally, Laravel offers way more possibilities to write secure and may also better code. Thinking of Eloquent ORM, the Validator, Observers, Behaviours, and so on.
3. It's modern
Laravel is one of the most modern PHP Frameworks in the world wide web. Accompanied by a extremely good documentation, you can set up relatively large projects relatively quickly. OctoberCMS does not only depend on Laravel, it lives the Laravel philosophy, extends and uses the system as it should be. If you know Laravel, you know October. If you aren't familiar with Laravel, you should take the step, because it is really worth it. It seems like every function, every line of code is extremely carefully thought out and it supports writing secure and clean code on such an extensive scale. Again, it's not impossible writing "bad" code in Laravel too, but I think it will be a challenge though.
4. It's fun working with
And the most important reason why I'm really convinced of using OctoberCMS is that it is just fun to work with. Of course, sometimes there are a few challenges as well, but so far nothing has left me in despair. It just makes fun coding again, after I had to work with Typo3, Prestashop and Moodle and lost myself in the horrible undocumented architecture of Kibana. Therefore I'm just really glad to have something like OctoberCMS and Laravel.
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