Help me choose: Filament or Nova
Hello everybody.
I understand that it's a little strange to ask this in the Filament community. It is expected that Filament will be more liked here. But I hope for objective advice from those who have dealt with both Filament and Nova.
Now I am faced with choosing an admin panel for my project. Among all the well-known ones, I highlighted Filament and Nova. I used to create an admin panel from scratch, but it takes a lot of time.
I looked at different sites and people in the comments in most cases choose Filament.
Now I'm studying tutorials.
For Filament: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6tf8fRbavl3jfL67gVOE9rF0jG5bNTMi
For Nova: https://laracasts.com/series/laravel-nova-mastery-2023-edition
And I see that some things are made more difficult in Filament than in Nova. For example, loading a list of selection fields depending on another selection field. To do this in Nova, it is enough to sign one property for each field. And in Filament you need several properties for each field and also do a query wrapper with filtering.
What do you recommend choosing in 2024? And why?
And recommend fresh and good video tutorials for Filament.
6 Replies
I'd go for Filament, open source, lots of contributors and quick bug fixes.
Nova is a paid product, with only 1 maintainer if I'm correct. Nova is also VUEjs, nothing wrong with that, but if you want to customize it you need to know this.
I know a webhosting company that built a new CRM on Nova and they have performance issues. Not sure if this is Nova related, but something to keep in mind with huge datasets.
But still, comes down to personal preference. Both packages are good.
I think everyone here is biased
I think there are 2 main differences from technical perspective:
Filament is built on top of Livewire. As Livewire renders everything server side this makes is slower and especially on larger forms/tables this can cause some performance issues. But usually you should be fine with the performance and it should be around 300–400ms for normal requests. Livewire makes it easy to extend Filament and just use Blade on your backend to adjust and configure a lot of things.
Nova is built on top of Vue.js. This makes in faster and the UI might feel more responsive. If you want to extend something you should have good Vue knowledge. It's also harder to extend some things, because unlike in Blade you cannot just overwrite one view file, you would need to define a separate file and overwrite every file that uses that file (maybe there's an easier way using build tools, that I don't know of)
I have used Nova in the past for both small and medium size projects... after the first week of using Filament I decided it's objectively much better. But as tygoegmond said you're not going to get people on a Filament server telling you to use Nova...
Yep I did the same, had a CRM app for a client which was built with Nova, ended up migrating it to filament in 2 days and the client has never been happier. Features dropped in in minutes opposed to hours too.
Filament to me is the leading admin dashboard, providing you want standardisation and not following some crazy bespoke design. It is possible still, but requires more indepth livewire knowledge and custom theming all which takes time to learn.
Thanks to all!