Building PickTool with Next.js and Laravel: Lessons from Creating a Software Discovery Platform
Finding software is easy. Finding the right software is not. Search for almost any category—email marketing, CRM, productivity, design, or AI—and you will find hundreds of options. Every product presents itself as the best choice, while many comparison articles repeat the same features without explaining which users each tool actually suits. That problem inspired me to build PickTool , a platform…
PickTool is a platform designed to help users discover and compare AI and SaaS tools. The project aims to provide the right software in minutes rather than hours, offering structured information about core features, pricing, use cases, strengths and limitations, ratings, alternatives, and direct comparisons. The challenge lies in creating a consistent experience across interconnected types of content.
PickTool leverages a decoupled architecture, with Next.js powering the public-facing website and Laravel handling the backend, API, database logic, and administration system. MySQL stores all the content, including tools, categories, ratings, pricing, and editorial information. One of the key lessons learned is that a software directory should not be modeled as a single table of products.
Instead, the data should be relational, with tools belonging to categories, having competitors, alternatives, comparison pages, pricing plans, use cases, and editorial guides. By modeling the content structure in this way, internal linking becomes more intentional, improving the user experience and SEO. The project also stresses the importance of treating SEO as part of the application architecture rather than an afterthought.
Every indexable page should have its own page title, meta description, canonical URL, heading structure, structured data, internal links, and open graph information. This requires clear rules, validation, testing, and regular audits to ensure consistency and avoid SEO issues that can arise from dynamic pages. Performance considerations also play a significant role in the development process.
While developers often focus on JavaScript bundles, caching, image sizes, and server response times, content structure can also impact performance. Keeping tool pages lightweight, optimizing images, using server-side data fetching, implementing caching, optimizing components, minimizing unnecessary client-side JavaScript, reducing API response size, and focusing on Core Web Vitals are all essential for maintaining a fast and efficient website.
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