Laravel has been the dominant PHP framework for over a decade now, and one of the first things any Laravel project needs is a decent admin panel. Whether you’re building a SaaS product, a content management system, or an internal business tool, you’re going to spend a lot of time in that admin interface — so it better not suck.
The Laravel admin ecosystem is split into two camps. On one side, you have admin panel frameworks like Filament and Backpack that generate fully functional CRUD interfaces from your Eloquent models. On the other, you have admin UI templates — pre-designed dashboard layouts that you wire up to your own backend logic. Both are useful, and which one you pick depends on whether you want convention or control.
We went through hundreds of GitHub repos to find the 18 best free options currently available. Every project on this list is open source, has meaningful community adoption, and comes with enough documentation to actually get you started. We’ve included everything from the 29k-star Filament framework down to lean TALL stack starter kits, covering Bootstrap, Tailwind, Vue, Livewire, and vanilla Blade approaches.
Filament is the undisputed king of Laravel admin panels right now. It’s not just a template — it’s a complete admin panel framework built on the TALL stack (Tailwind, Alpine.js, Livewire, Laravel). You define your resources as PHP classes, and Filament generates everything: tables with sorting and filtering, forms with 50+ field types, relation managers, widgets, notifications, and dashboards. The amount of functionality you get without writing a single line of JavaScript is genuinely impressive.
Version 3 brought a modular architecture where you can use the Form Builder, Table Builder, Notifications, and Actions packages independently or together. The plugin ecosystem is thriving too, with hundreds of community packages adding everything from Kanban boards to map widgets. If you’re starting a new Laravel project in 2026 and need an admin panel, Filament should be your default choice unless you have a very specific reason to go elsewhere.
Before Filament existed, z-song’s Laravel Admin was the go-to solution for generating admin interfaces in Laravel. The pitch was simple: build a full-featured admin panel in ten minutes using model-grid, model-form, model-show, and model-tree components. Define your fields, configure your columns, and you’ve got a working CRUD interface backed by AdminLTE 2 and Bootstrap 3.
Fair warning: the last meaningful commit was in early 2023, so this is effectively in maintenance mode. It doesn’t support Laravel 10+ natively, and the jQuery/Bootstrap 3 stack feels dated. But with 11,000+ stars and years of production use, there’s a massive knowledge base of blog posts, tutorials, and Stack Overflow answers. If you’re maintaining an older Laravel app that already uses it, there’s no urgent reason to migrate. For new projects though, look at Filament or MoonShine instead.
If you’re also exploring admin panels outside the Laravel ecosystem, check out our roundup of the best admin templates across all frameworks.
Orchid takes a different architectural approach from most Laravel admin builders. Instead of auto-generating CRUD from models, it uses a “Screen” pattern where each admin page is a Screen class containing its own layout definition, data queries, and action methods. Think of it like Laravel controllers that also define their own views — it gives you significantly more control over the UI while still providing pre-built layout components.
The frontend runs on Hotwire (Turbo + Stimulus) with Bootstrap 5, which means fast page transitions without the complexity of a full SPA. Orchid ships with form fields, tables, charts, filters, and modals as reusable layout elements. It’s actively maintained with regular releases and solid English documentation. The learning curve is steeper than Filament’s convention-over-configuration approach, but developers who want more explicit control over their admin UI often prefer it.
Dcat Admin is essentially a modernized fork of z-song’s Laravel Admin (#2 on this list), built to address performance issues and add richer built-in components. The API is familiar if you’ve used the original — model grids, forms, and trees — but with better lazy loading, asynchronous rendering, and a cleaner AdminLTE 3 frontend based on Bootstrap 4.
The catch: documentation is primarily in Chinese. If you read Chinese or are comfortable navigating with Google Translate, you’ll find a mature and capable admin framework with excellent component variety. The code itself is well-structured and follows Laravel conventions, so experienced developers can figure things out from the source even without perfect docs. It’s still receiving updates and has an active community on Chinese developer platforms.
Twill isn’t really an “admin panel” in the traditional CRUD sense — it’s a CMS toolkit built by the digital agency AREA 17 for content-heavy applications. If you’re building something that involves managing articles, media, pages, or any structured content, Twill gives you a polished editorial interface that content teams actually enjoy using. The block editor, media library, and revision system are genuinely well-designed.
Under the hood, it’s Vue.js on the frontend with Tailwind CSS, and the latest versions support both Vue 2 and Vue 3. The admin interface is opinionated in a good way — browser/listing views, form modules, and nested content blocks follow consistent patterns. It’s used by major publishers and agencies in production, which shows in the attention to content workflow details. Not the right tool for a generic admin panel, but unbeatable for content management within Laravel.
Looking for more options beyond Laravel? Our free admin panels collection covers the best dashboards across all backend frameworks.
InfyOm takes the code generation approach to admin panels. Instead of a runtime framework that interprets your model definitions, it literally generates the files: models, migrations, repositories, controllers, views, API resources, request classes, and even test stubs. You define your schema once, run the artisan command, and get a full stack of files you own and can modify freely.
This is a fundamentally different philosophy from Filament or Backpack. You trade the convenience of declarative configuration for complete control over the generated code — no magic, no runtime overhead, no framework lock-in. The generator supports Bootstrap 4/5 templates with AdminLTE, and can produce both web CRUD and API endpoints simultaneously. It’s particularly popular with teams who want scaffolding speed but don’t want to depend on an admin framework in production.
Backpack has been around since 2016 and has the battle-tested feel to prove it. The CRUD package provides 50+ field types, 20+ column types, filters, buttons, and widgets — all configurable through a fluent PHP API in your controller. Version 6 brought Bootstrap 5, improved theming via CoreUI, and better performance. The ecosystem includes official add-ons for permissions, page management, settings, log viewing, and more.
The licensing is worth understanding: the core CRUD package is MIT and genuinely free. Some add-on packages require a Backpack license for commercial projects, but you can build a fully functional admin panel using only the free components. The documentation is some of the best in the Laravel ecosystem — detailed, well-organized, and full of real-world examples. If Filament’s Livewire-first approach doesn’t fit your project, Backpack’s traditional Blade + jQuery stack might feel more comfortable, especially for teams coming from older Laravel versions.
Laravue is what you get when you take the popular vue-element-admin template and properly integrate it with a Laravel backend. It’s a full single-page application with JWT authentication, role-based access control, charts, and CRUD interfaces — all powered by Vue.js 2 and Element UI on the frontend, with Laravel handling the API.
The SPA architecture means smooth transitions and a desktop-app feel, which is a nice change from the traditional full-page-reload approach of most Laravel admin panels. That said, the last commit was in 2022, so it’s running Vue 2 and an older Laravel version. It’s still a solid reference for how to build a Laravel + Vue admin SPA, but you’d need to invest time upgrading the dependencies for a new production project. Think of it more as a well-executed blueprint than a ready-to-deploy solution.
Vue.js developers might also want to explore Tailwind admin dashboard templates that include Vue-based options with more modern stacks.
LaraAdmin differentiates itself with a visual schema editor that lets you define your admin modules through a GUI rather than writing code. You design your data structure visually, and LaraAdmin generates the corresponding models, migrations, controllers, and views. It also includes a module manager, backup system, and role-based access control out of the box.
The frontend is AdminLTE-based with Bootstrap and jQuery — functional but not modern. Activity on the repo has been sporadic, with the last significant commit in mid-2023. The visual approach can be appealing for smaller projects or prototyping, but for production applications you’ll likely want the code-level control that Filament or Backpack provide. Worth a look if the drag-and-drop schema builder concept appeals to your workflow.
MoonShine is the most exciting newcomer on this list. Built from the ground up with a modern TALL stack (Tailwind, Alpine.js, Livewire, Laravel), it offers the same “define your admin in PHP” developer experience as Filament but with its own design language and component system. The form builder, table builder, and dashboard widgets are all well-thought-out, and the dark mode looks genuinely good — not just “we inverted the colors” good.
What sets MoonShine apart is its focus on developer experience for beginners. The documentation walks you through everything step-by-step, and the API is intuitive enough that you can build a working admin panel in under an hour. It’s actively maintained with commits landing weekly, and the community is growing fast. If Filament ever feels too heavy for your needs, MoonShine provides a lighter alternative without sacrificing the modern stack.
Badaso positions itself as a “Laravel headless CMS” which is more accurate than calling it a plain admin panel. It generates REST APIs from your database tables, provides a Vue.js + Vuetify frontend for managing content, and supports PWA out of the box. The CRUD generator handles basic admin operations, while the headless architecture means your frontend can be anything — a mobile app, a JAMstack site, or a custom SPA.
The Vue 2 + Vuetify frontend gives you Material Design aesthetics without extra work, and the API-first approach is genuinely useful if you need your admin data accessible from multiple clients. Developed by an Indonesian team, the documentation is in English and covers the basics well. It occupies a unique niche between traditional admin panels and headless CMS platforms — useful if that’s exactly what your project needs.
For frontend-focused admin solutions, our list of React admin templates covers the best React-based dashboard options available today.
Craftable comes from BRACKETS, a Slovak development agency that built it for their own client projects and then open-sourced it. That origin story shows — it solves real production problems like translatable content, media management, user administration, and listing/filtering patterns that agency developers encounter repeatedly.
The free version uses Bootstrap 4 with Vue.js and Blade for a hybrid rendering approach. Craftable PRO upgrades to Tailwind CSS and Vue 3, but the free tier is fully functional for building admin panels. The CRUD generator follows Laravel conventions closely, so the generated code feels natural rather than framework-specific. It’s not as widely adopted as Filament or Backpack, but the agency-tested architecture means fewer edge cases in real-world scenarios.
Maintained by the Russian Laravel community, SleepingOwl Admin provides a flexible section-based layout system for building admin interfaces. You define display types, column configurations, form elements, and filters in PHP, and the framework renders them using AdminLTE with Bootstrap 4. The API supports custom column types and form elements, so you’re not limited to the built-in options.
The documentation is primarily in Russian, which limits accessibility for English-speaking developers. The codebase is clean enough to navigate without docs if you’re an experienced Laravel developer, but it’s definitely a barrier. SleepingOwl occupies a middle ground between the simplicity of a template and the power of a full framework — less magic than Filament, more structure than rolling your own. Best suited for Russian-speaking teams or developers comfortable working from source code.
CoreUI is a well-known admin template brand, and this is their official Laravel integration. Unlike the admin panel frameworks above, this is a pure UI template — a pre-designed dashboard with charts, widgets, tables, forms, and icons that you connect to your own Laravel backend. The design is clean and professional, with CoreUI’s distinctive sidebar navigation and card-based layout.
The elephant in the room: the last commit was in 2020. The code targets Laravel 7 with Bootstrap 4, jQuery, and Chart.js. It still works as a visual reference and starting point, but you’ll need to update dependencies for any modern Laravel project. CoreUI itself has moved forward significantly since then, so consider using the latest CoreUI components with a fresh Laravel install rather than this specific repo. Still, 670 stars suggest plenty of developers have successfully adapted it.
For a broader look at admin UI options, browse our comprehensive Tailwind CSS templates collection.
EasyPanel lives up to its name. It’s a Livewire-based admin panel generator that creates CRUD interfaces through artisan commands with minimal configuration. Run a single command, point it at your model, and you get a working admin page with create, read, update, and delete operations — all styled with Tailwind CSS and powered by the TALL stack.
The simplicity is both its strength and limitation. You won’t find the 50+ field types of Backpack or the plugin ecosystem of Filament, but you will get a functional admin panel running in minutes with clean, understandable code. It’s ideal for smaller projects, MVPs, or situations where you need basic CRUD administration without pulling in a heavyweight framework. The generated Livewire components are straightforward to customize once you understand the pattern.
Sneat is a polished admin UI template from ThemeSelection, and this is their free Laravel integration. Unlike the admin panel frameworks we’ve covered, Sneat is purely a frontend template — beautifully designed dashboard pages, auth screens, user management views, and UI components that you integrate with your own Laravel controllers and logic. The design quality rivals paid templates, with clean typography, consistent spacing, and thoughtful color usage throughout.
The tech stack is Bootstrap 5 with jQuery and SCSS, compiled through Laravel Mix. Pre-built pages include a main dashboard, login/register flows, account settings, and various UI element showcases. ThemeSelection offers a PRO version with significantly more pages and components, but the free version is a fully functional starting point. If you prefer Bootstrap’s component patterns over Tailwind’s utility approach and want a dashboard that looks professional without custom design work, Sneat delivers.
Cruip’s Mosaic template has earned a reputation for looking like a finished product rather than a starting template, and the Laravel version carries that same polish. Built on the TALL stack with Livewire, Jetstream, and Tailwind CSS, it provides a clean analytics dashboard with Chart.js widgets, data cards, and a well-designed sidebar layout. The design aesthetic is modern SaaS — think Stripe’s dashboard or Linear’s interface.
Since it uses Jetstream, you get authentication, registration, email verification, and two-factor authentication baked in from the start. The free version focuses on the dashboard layout and core components, while Cruip’s paid tier adds more page templates. It’s one of the few Laravel admin templates that uses Tailwind CSS natively rather than Bootstrap, making it a natural fit if your application’s frontend is already Tailwind-based.
AdminTW is less of a template and more of a production-ready TALL stack starter kit. It gives you a fresh Laravel installation with Livewire, Alpine.js, and Tailwind CSS pre-configured, plus authentication, user management, roles and permissions, and a clean admin layout with dark mode support. Think of it as Laravel Breeze but specifically designed for admin panel development.
The star count is modest, but the project is practical and well-maintained. The codebase is lean — no bloated component libraries or unnecessary abstractions. Every piece of functionality is there because an admin panel actually needs it. For developers who want to build their admin interface from scratch but don’t want to spend hours on the authentication and layout boilerplate, AdminTW saves a solid day of setup work. The TALL stack foundation means you can incrementally add Filament components or custom Livewire features as your project grows.
The biggest decision you need to make isn’t which template to pick — it’s whether you need an admin panel framework or an admin UI template. If your project is CRUD-heavy and you want to define admin interfaces declaratively in PHP, go with a framework: Filament for the TALL stack, Backpack for Bootstrap/Blade, or MoonShine if you want something modern but lighter. If you already have your controllers and logic built and just need a polished frontend, grab a UI template like Sneat, CoreUI Laravel, or Mosaic Lite and wire it up yourself.
The TALL stack (Tailwind + Alpine.js + Livewire + Laravel) has clearly won the architectural debate in the Laravel admin space. Filament, MoonShine, EasyPanel, AdminTW, and Mosaic Lite all use it, and for good reason — Livewire eliminates the JavaScript complexity of SPA admin panels while still delivering reactive interfaces. That said, Bootstrap-based options like Backpack and Sneat remain perfectly viable, especially for teams with existing Bootstrap expertise. Whatever you choose, make sure to check the live demo, skim the source code, and verify the last commit date. A 10,000-star repo that hasn’t been updated in three years is worth less than a 300-star repo with weekly commits and responsive maintainers.
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