Laravel is a popular open-source framework for web application development. It follows the MVC (Model-View-Controller) architectural pattern, allowing developers to better organize their code and allowing for scalable, user-friendly web application development. Laravel provides tools and libraries for handling tasks such as routing, database abstraction, queueing, and authentication, reducing the complexity of developing large and robust applications. It's written in PHP and was created by Taylor Otwell in 2011.