A Decade of Laravel Admin Panels: What Survived and Why
I've been building admin panel software since 2012. For Laravel specifically, since 2014. That's over a decade of watching developers —...
Cristian Tabacitu
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I've been building admin panel software since 2012. For Laravel specifically, since 2014. That's over a decade of watching developers —...
I've been building admin panel software since 2012. For Laravel specifically, since 2014. That's over a decade of watching developers — talented, passionate, generous developers — launch promising tools, pour weekends into them, share them freely with the community, and then... slowly, quietly, stop.
This isn't a story about failure. Every project in this article made Laravel better. Some of them pioneered ideas that the surviving panels later adopted. Some of their authors went on to become contributors to Laravel's core. The open-source spirit that drove them was real and valuable.
But if you are choosing an admin panel today — for a real project, with real deadlines and real clients — you need to understand what happened to the ones that didn't make it. Because picking the wrong one is a trap that's very easy to fall into, and very expensive to escape.
This is the history. Here's what survived, what didn't, and what you should look for when choosing.
Early days (2012–2016): The Laravel community was young and excited. Developers reached for the obvious challenge: building admin interfaces. Projects like FrozenNode's Laravel-Administrator, PingPong Labs Admin, Bootstrap CMS, and Rapyd Laravel appeared. These were experiments — and good ones. They proved there was demand.
The growth years (2016–2021): As Laravel matured, so did the admin panel space. More polished tools appeared: Backpack (2016), Voyager (2017), LaraAdmin (2016), Craftable (2017), Nova (2018), Orchid (2017). This was peak experimentation. Some of these looked very promising. The community was growing fast, and every new launch got excited attention.
The consolidation (2021–2026): Filament launched in March 2021 and grew quickly. By now, the landscape has sorted itself out — not by anyone's grand plan, but by the natural pressure of maintenance. The projects that had a sustainable model kept going. The ones that didn't, gradually stopped.
The ecosystem is richer because of everything that was tried. The survivors stand on the shoulders of what came before. But I have to call it as I see it - most Laravel admin panels that have ever launched... are now dead. I'd rather not look at it as a graveyard though... but as a museum - and learn from it.
Here's the complete list — again, not a hall of shame, but a museum. A record of what was built.
The statuses below reflect the state of each project as of early 2026, based on GitHub activity, release history, and community presence.
These are the only three you should seriously consider for a new project today:
A long list — and again, not a list of failures. A list of contributions.
That list is long. And it doesn't include all the private, half-finished admin panels that developers built, used once for a client, and quietly abandoned.
Look at Backpack, Filament, and Nova. Three very different tools — different stacks, different philosophies, different price points. But they share a few things:
A real business model. Backpack sells add-ons and services. Nova sells licenses. Filament has built a commercial ecosystem of plugins and is backed by sponsorships and consulting. None of them depend purely on goodwill.
A team, not a person. All three have more than one person who understands the codebase deeply. When one person gets busy, the project doesn't grind to a halt.
A stable, deliberate tech stack. They all made choices about their stack and stuck with them. Backpack chose Blade and Bootstrap — boring, stable, long-lived. Filament chose Livewire and Tailwind — modern and popular, but a deliberate bet. Nova chose Vue and Tailwind. None of them chased every new trend.
Longevity. The youngest of the three (Filament) is six years old. By the time you're reading this, all three have survived multiple major Laravel versions, multiple frontend shifts, and the general chaos of the PHP ecosystem in the 2020s.
This is the part that most developers don't think about when they first launch a project. Building the first version is the fun part. What comes after is a different story.
1. The feature list never ends. An admin panel serves every possible kind of project. Users will always need something you haven't built: a new field type, a new operation, a new filter. Every month, more requests. The surface area keeps growing.
2. Every Laravel update is a potential fire drill. When Laravel releases a new major version, admin panels need to update — or start breaking in subtle ways. Do that for ten years, through multiple PHP versions, and it adds up to an enormous maintenance burden.
3. Monetization is genuinely hard. Sponsorships sound good but rarely cover real costs. Open-core means balancing what to give away vs. what to charge for. Closed-source alienates part of the community. Every model has downsides. Getting it wrong means the project runs out of steam before it runs out of users.
4. Tech stack choices age. This one is underappreciated. If you build on a fast-moving stack — Vue 2, or an early version of Livewire, or a CSS framework in heavy flux — you inherit all of its churn. Admin panels need to keep up with their dependencies. Every dependency update is another maintenance tax. The projects that picked boring, stable stacks have an easier time of it.
5. Passion is finite. Many admin panels were built because a developer needed one for their own work. Once that need was met — or once the developer moved on to a different job, framework, or phase of life — the project lost its engine. This is completely human and understandable. It's also a risk if you're betting your project on someone else's hobby.
Here's something worth thinking about in 2026 specifically: AI has made it dramatically easier to build an admin panel from scratch.
A motivated developer can prompt Claude or GPT into scaffolding a functional admin panel in a weekend. Entire CRUDs, authentication, dashboards — generated. The graveyard list above is going to get longer, not shorter, because the barrier to building has dropped so far.
But AI doesn't solve the maintenance problem. AI doesn't automatically update your codebase when Laravel 14 ships. AI doesn't triage bug reports from users across three different PHP versions. AI doesn't decide which features to prioritize, which breaking changes to accept, and which ones to fight.
The graveyard risk is higher than ever. More tools will be built. More tools will be abandoned. The delta between "can ship a v1" and "will maintain this for five years" has never been larger.
This is exactly why the choice of admin panel matters more, not less, in 2026.
Here's a practical checklist. When you're evaluating an admin panel — for a real project — ask these questions:
In 2026, the answers to these questions clearly point to three options: Backpack, Filament, and Nova. Anything else is a gamble.
For a more detailed comparison of these three, see this guide — including how they compare for AI-assisted development.
If you built any of the projects in the list above: thank you.
Seriously. Every one of those projects was a generous act. You solved your own problem, packaged it up, and gave it away for free. You helped developers who were stuck. You proved what was possible. You fed ideas into the ecosystem that the surviving projects later picked up and improved.
Open source works because people share before they know if it'll matter. You mattered — even if the package is no longer maintained.
Most Laravel admin panels don't survive. That's not a flaw in the ecosystem — it's just the nature of complex software that requires indefinite maintenance, a sustainable business model, and lasting passion to keep going.
The good news: in 2026, you don't have to guess which tools will still be around. You have three proven options, with real teams and real track records. Pick one of them. Commit to it. Build on it.
Your admin panel is a long-term dependency. Treat it like one.
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