@mevrael has too many concise positive and realistic points that make Laravel a great framework, however, if you listen to Taylor's laravel Postcast (creator of the magnificent framework), he actually branched off from CI into Laravel and he was also once a CI user.
As @mevrael mentioned: Business Needs Over fandom... If your business is xbox exclusive but you are a ps4 fan boy, you will learn xbox sdk one way or another.
being a new developer I always suggest to go the harder route in order to appreciate what the better framework has. Let us not forget that by default Laravel used to be symfony driven (and there are still a lot of component from symfony that is still in the core) therefore if you know symfony first, transitioning into laravel will make you appreciate it better. Same as CI goes back when it PHP wasn't composer driven.
I personally prefer Laravel over CI because all point raised by @mevrael, however I bare no ill will towards CI because I came from CI when CI was the choice over cake and zend.