8 Best Laravel Admin Panel Packages for Your Back Office System
September 21, 2022
Last Updated: September 24, 2022
Are you looking to create an internal admin dashboard or back office system for your business? The PHP-based Laravel framework is a great option due to its ease of use and flexibility.
Laravel has been one of the most popular PHP frameworks for many years. It is adaptable, scalable, versatile, and has become one of the in fact the systems for engineers and companies working with PHP.
Laravel provides a lot of features out of the box, ensuring you can get a dashboard up and running without too much difficulty. But rather than building completely from scratch, a Laravel admin panel package could save you a lot of time.
When making a choice, take into account things such as product design (colour scheme, convenience, etc.), features (whether they comply with the project requirements or not), UI components and customization capabilities.
Let’s first discuss five general categories to consider when choosing an admin panel package of Laravel for your application.
CRUD Interfaces
Since the Laravel framework follows the MVC (Model-View-Controller) pattern, a popular architecture method for admin panel packages is to supply CRUD interfaces. These are sets of views and controllers which automatically add CRUD logic and UI to existing models.
The downside is that if your requirements stray from standard CRUD—for example, if you have complex relationships between models—you may have a difficult time getting it to work how you want.
Some of the most popular Laravel admin panel packages fall into this category, including Nova, Backpack, and Orchid.
Scaffolding
The primary purpose of scaffolding packages is to generate a Laravel boilerplate by programmatically creating the files and config you need to get up and running.
For example, say you want to create an admin panel for your travel business. Your key entities are Products(either tours or activities or hotels), Bookings and Agencies. A scaffolding package could generate the models, controllers, routes, views, etc., for each of these entities automatically, including the CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) operations.
Visual Programming
A visual programming package will allow you to manage your site purely from a GUI. Kind of like a CMS, except you can generally add more detailed site configuration.
Visual programming packages are a good option when your team has non-developers, but these packages are usually limited to generic functionality.
Examples of this type of an admin panel generator are Voyager and Backpack DevTools.
Themes and component libraries
Some admin panel packages focus only on the user interface, i.e., themes and component libraries. This means you don’t get assistance on the back end, just the front end.
For example, Creative Tim’s Argon admin template doesn’t provide any CRUD interfaces or generators but does provide detailed front-end components useful for admin apps—like tables, charts, menus, etc.
License—paid vs. open source
Another angle of difference for admin panel packages is whether they’re paid or free aka open-source. Before you conclude that free is better, consider that packages with a robust business model may be better supported.
If you aim to develop a tool that saves you both money and time, it may make more sense to spend a small amount on a paid license.
Now that we understand some of the main factors that differentiate Laravel admin panel packages, let’s take a look at some of the most popular ones.
Laravel Nova
Nova is a beautifully-designed administration panel for Laravel. Carefully crafted by the creators of Laravel, Nova is designed to make you the most productive developer in the galaxy.
Laravel Nova was launched on 22nd August 2018, as the official administration panel for Laravel web applications. Nova has evolved since then and evolved a lot! It’s no longer a simple Resource Management tool.
In my eyes, it can be everything from an admin panel to a CMS to a CRM. It’s rocket fuel for your Laravel projects that lets you focus on the features that matter to your users.
Image Source: https://nova.laravel.com/
Pros
- Created by the Laravel team and is consistent with Laravel features and design philosophy
- Low amount of configuration allowing quick integration with existing Laravel projects
- Clean, good looking interface
Cons
- Low configuration means it relies on “magic” and can therefore make customization hard
- No free trial – requires a license ($99 for small projects, $199 for large)
Laravel Livewire (TALL Stack)
Livewire is a full-stack framework for Laravel that makes building dynamic interfaces simple, without leaving the comfort of Laravel.
Laravel Livewire is a library that makes it simple to build modern, reactive, dynamic interfaces using Laravel Blade as your templating language. This is a great stack to choose if you want to build an application that is dynamic and reactive but don’t feel comfortable jumping into a full JavaScript framework like Vue.
Livewire development tech stack also popularly referred as TALL (Tailwind, AlpineJS, Livewire, Laravel) stack among the developers.
Image Source: https://livewire-datatables.com/actions
Pros
- Ideal for full-stack developers who don’t want to go with full javascript frameworks like Vue or React.
- Rich UI Implementation libraries for your Single Page Application(SPA).
- Easy data exchange between core laravel and livewire components.
- Free
Cons
- Doesn’t have out-of-the-box magic like Nova – you’ll need to write some code to get started
- Not ideal for existing projects
Backpack Laravel
Backpack is a Laravel admin project created by Romanian developer Cristian Tăbăcitu in 2016. It’s a strong all-rounder as it includes not only a CRUD interface package, but also an optional visual programming interface, and its own UI framework.
Given this versatility, Backpack is not free. However, a free license can be provided for non-commercial use.
Image Source: https://backpackforlaravel.com/
Pros
- Excellent documentation, including video tutorials
- Great front end theme
- Free option for non-commercial projects
Cons
- Relatively expensive if you want all the tools and options
Laravel Orchid
Orchid is an open-source CRUD interface package for the Laravel framework that allows rapid, code-driven development of admin panels.
Created primarily by Russian developer Alexandr Chernyaev, Orchid allows you to build admin panels using handy features like a form builder, table filtering and sorting, and text search.
The most striking thing about Orchid is its open-source community which sustains this well-featured product without any paid tier (though you can support Orchid through sponsorship).
Image Source: https://orchid.software/en/
Pros
- Free and open-source
- Easily customizable
- Great community and support on GitHub from the author
- Frequently updated
Cons
- Doesn’t have out-of-the-box magic like Nova – you’ll need to write some code to get started
- Documentation could do with improvement
Laravel Voyager
Unlike the other admin panel packages we’ve looked at so far, Voyager is a visual builder for your Laravel app allowing you to build from the UI rather than through code.
While this may be perfect for certain kinds of projects, you’re limited to a GUI which is far less flexible than code.
Image Source: https://voyager.devdojo.com/
Pros
- Great for members of your team who have limited programming experience
- Provides free video training courses so you can learn quickly
- Can easily extend and override default controllers
Cons
- Fine-grained configuration of Laravel is difficult with a visual builder
- Runs counter to the design of Laravel as a framework as opposed to a CMS
InfyOm Laravel Generator
Every time you set up a Laravel project, you’ll need to define the models, controllers, routes, and views of each entity. This can be tedious and take quite a bit of time.
InfyOm Laravel Generator is a tool created by the Indian development company InfyOm. It’s made for creating Laravel admin sites that will scaffold all your boilerplate code in a matter of minutes.
Image Source: https://infyom.com/open-source/
Pros
- Saves a lot of time
- Scaffolds with best practices like Repository pattern, Swagger annotations, and test cases
- No vendor lock-in
- Free
Cons
- UI template is not that impressive compared to others
- Not ideal for existing projects
- Not great for rapid prototyping as you need to know your model structures upfront
Lavalite
Lavalites helps you to quickly set up a content management system or a cloud-based application based on Laravel. Its package builder and marketplace will help you to build or find additional packages required for your application.
Open Source bundle – No need of paying any chunk of money on the packages associated with Lavalite. There are no usage restrictions and is flexible to use in whatever form you need. Lavalite with its powerful and flexible HMVC architecture promotes good design and offers best practices.
Image Source: https://lavalite.org/products
Pros
- Have marketplace for ready made scripts & applications
- Ready made products save lots of time if you want to implement Real Estate portal, Classifieds portal, Job portal, Yellow Pages and automobile portals.
Cons
- Not ideal for existing projects
- Doesn’t have out-of-the-box magic like Nova – you’ll need to write some code to get started
- Documentation could do with improvement
Argon Dashboard Laravel
Argon Laravel Dashboard is a Bootstrap 4-based admin dashboard built for Laravel. The Pro version ($149 license) includes over 100+ handy components like charts, tables, etc.
Argon includes a Laravel backend, but it’s quite rudimentary. It doesn’t include any special package for CRUD interfaces, scaffolding, or visual programming like we’ve seen in other projects.
For that reason, I think this product is most suitable for projects where you want to write the controller logic yourself and mostly want help with the view layer.
Image Source: https://www.creative-tim.com/product/argon-dashboard-laravel
Pros
- Beautiful design
- Hundreds of front-end components
- Has a free version as well as a Pro version for $149
- Supports multiple frontend libraries
Cons
- The Laravel-side of the template is very basic
In The End…
As you can see, there are a variety of options when it comes to building an admin panel using Laravel. Each tool comes with its own strengths and weaknesses, and the one you choose will depend on the specific requirements of your project as well as the strengths of your team.
Not sure which package suits your application best? You can rely on the experience of the Hetarth Consulting team to dig out the same for you. We can help you on implementation of your Admin Panel or Back Office system with any of above platforms with RESTful API support for your Front-ends.
Get in touch for a free consultation!!
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