Filament and Nova are the two credible answers to "how do I build a Laravel admin panel fast?" We reach for both in 2026. Here's the split.
The pricing gap matters
Nova is $199/site (or a per-project licence). Filament is free and MIT-licensed. On a client project where the client owns the codebase, that difference lands in the client's lap. Free wins by default unless there's a reason.
Filament wins on...
- Faster to build. Livewire under the hood means resource pages feel like magic.
- Beautiful defaults. The Filament UI looks better than 90% of custom admins.
- Free forever. No licence audit, no per-project cost.
- Community. More plugins, more Stack Overflow answers, more examples.
Nova wins on...
- Official support. Laravel's team maintains it. For enterprise clients with procurement teams, this matters.
- Vue-based extensibility. If your team is Vue-heavy and wants to extend the admin with custom React-free components.
- Long-lived stability. Nova moves slower — that's a bug for some, a feature for others.
The 90/10 split
On our projects: Filament v3 for 90% of new admins. Nova for the 10% where the client explicitly requires Laravel-supported tooling.
For an existing Nova app, we don't migrate — the switching cost is real and the Nova ceiling is high enough that "we should be on Filament" is rarely the actual problem.