Hi folks –
I'm looking for an "admin dashboard" package for Laravel that meets the following criteria (or comes close):
* **Works with Laravel 8.x**
* **Provides a basic dashboard layout**, with a left nav, breadcrumbs, styling for standard CRUD tables/buttons/forms, maybe an icon library, etc.
* **Makes it fast and easy for me, as a developer, to build rich forms.** It should provide Blade components (or similar) which allow me to say: "it's an email input field, it's labeled 'Your Email Address', its name is 'user\_email', it has the help text 'Type your email address here', and it's required" – and let the package worry about generating the proper markup for the
What would you recommend checking out?
Thanks!
I recommend you Livewire, it’s not a “admin dashboard” it’s much more than a “admin dashboard” but it does what you need.
I have spent countless hours and days looking for awesome laravel boilerplates for SaaS and admin panels…
I love NOVA, trust me it’s so worth it 🙂
I have a few applications running on Spark and other frameworks and it’s deffo good.
But Taylor recently released Jetstream that is basically a modern spark without the billing.
Which is kind of preffered because in all my cases I have had to do extra work in terms of the opinated spark billing logic.
So Jetstream is the perfect boilerplate 🙂
Nowadays stripe is so easy and flexible to cook in its ridiculously awesome 🙂
I don’t know if it his _all_ your points, but the non first-party OSS counterpart to Nova is Backpack. I played with backpack a while back, and it seems nice enough. But, for me, Nova just gets shit done and that’s enough for me. It’s worth the $$.
https://backpackforlaravel.com/
I **highly** recommend [Orchid](http://orchid.software/) \- in my opinion, it’s massively underrated and should be much more popular. The core developer is very supportive on Github or on the EN/RU Telegram channel if you have any question (next to good documentation, tutorials and a blog).
I was in the same position as you as I’ve tried to prevent reinventing the wheel finally found Orchid. I’m still very happy with it 🙂
i’m also a developer, i off course can handle forms creation and makeup with css but it’s a pain in the ass, you can do it programatically and with a lot of different components that also are included in filters for dinamic tables, layouts and more all of them comes ship in the orchid/platform (https://orchid.software ) package
The main difference is that it introduces in laravel and in php a very handy concept thing called screens as class that ease the view manipulation instead using controllers
I like code16’s sharp package
I recommend Orchid as others already did. I used voyager before and has been a nightmare when I needed something a bit different from the standard. Orchid on the other way gives you the tools to build what you need.
I wrote “a few screens for password resets and a couple reports” for one client, and of course that blew up into a custom admin UI, based on vue2, bootstrap-vue and a bespoke API backend based on BREAD operations and service discovery. I like the backend design, front end needs refactoring, probably to an InertiaJS “SPA”.
I’ll probably just keep rolling with it for that client, but for the other Laravel project in my shop I might just grab something off the shelf like Orchid or Backpack instead.
Anyone else in the same boat?
I’ve used both Backpack and Nova at my workplace. We currently use Nova, but I agree that not having the ability to write your own controller logic is frustrating.
I’ve said before in another thread about CRUD frameworks, both are easy to use and will massively simplify creating forms. The main difference in my opinion is that backpack will let you inject whatever you want into controllers and lets you use blade for templating fields. Nova on the other hand is VERY opinionated about what should and should not be don’t in a CRUD page. It uses Vue for the field templates and is of the belief that if you need extra logic done, it’s better sent to events, observers, etc…
I’d do your due diligence as suggested by others here regarding Orchid, I haven’t used it myself. Otherwise, you won’t regret using Backpack over Nova. They’re both great tools. Just don’t get TOO crazy in backpack or your upgrades will make you want to start the whole project over in a different framework.
I’ve used [Sharp](https://github.com/code16/sharp) which is good, though I would say that coming from Nova it feels pretty clumsy.
There seems to be a lot more configuration needed for atomic pieces. When adding a model I need to define classes for listing, updating, menu entries and such, where in Nova I just add a `Nova/Model` class and let it set everything up for me.
The CSS / JS customisation aspects are there but you have to work within the Sharp methodology a lot more than I liked.
Still, as you said you want less of the ‘magic’ maybe it’s worth looking into.
!Remindme
Why not get a bootstrap or tail wind admin theme and then build your own dashboard using their layout? It would have everything you want.
Check it [Metronic](https://keenthemes.com/metronic/) theme. A lot of properties. It is not free but very nice
https://www.maelstrom-cms.com/
As barebones to vanilla Laravel as you can get, you make all your own templates, all your own controllers etc, but just use any helper methods you want and any blade components you want, or make your own.
Does anyone know which of the several laravel admin packages mentioned in this thread is most similar to django’s admin?
I started using voyager ([https://voyager.devdojo.com/](https://voyager.devdojo.com/)), I have been using backpack ([https://backpackforlaravel.com](https://backpackforlaravel.com/)) for a long time now and also used Nova for some good time now ([https://nova.laravel.com](https://nova.laravel.com/))
Above all, I still prefer to use backpack due to ease of customization and control plus a rich set of fields.
Other Admin panels like litstack ([https://litstack.io/](https://litstack.io/)) and Orchid ([https://orchid.software/](https://orchid.software/)) are also great though I have not really built a production application with them.