Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Laravel Nova VS Active Admin

Compare Laravel Nova VS Active Admin and see what are their differences

Laravel Nova logo Laravel Nova

Application and Data, Languages & Frameworks, and MVC Tools

Active Admin logo Active Admin

The administration framework for business critical Ruby on Rails applications.
  • Laravel Nova Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-08-21
  • Active Admin Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-07-30

Laravel Nova features and specs

  • Ease of Integration
    Laravel Nova is designed to work seamlessly with the Laravel framework, allowing for quick and efficient integration with existing Laravel applications.
  • User Interface
    Nova provides a clean, responsive, and modern user interface that enhances the user experience for both developers and end-users.
  • Resource Management
    It offers comprehensive tools for managing resources, relationships, and metrics, making it easier to handle complex data structures within the admin panel.
  • Customizability
    Developers can easily customize the Nova dashboard, including fields, actions, filters, and lenses, to suit their application needs.
  • Active Community and Support
    As part of the Laravel ecosystem, Nova benefits from an active community, detailed documentation, and ongoing support and updates.

Possible disadvantages of Laravel Nova

  • Cost
    Unlike other free open-source Laravel solutions, Nova is a paid product, which might not be suitable for small projects or developers with limited budgets.
  • Learning Curve
    For developers who are new to Laravel or Nova, there is a learning curve to effectively understand and utilize all of Nova’s features.
  • Limited Extensibility
    While Nova is customizable, there are certain extensibility limitations that might require a workaround or in-depth understanding to overcome.
  • Dependence on Laravel Ecosystem
    Nova is tightly coupled with Laravel, which means it cannot be used with other PHP frameworks, thus limiting its use cases.
  • Performance Concerns
    In some cases, especially with larger datasets or more complex operations, there might be performance bottlenecks if the Nova configurations are not optimized properly.

Active Admin features and specs

  • Rapid Development
    Active Admin allows for rapid development of back-end administration dashboards without having to code everything from scratch. It provides a default set of controllers, routes, and views that can be easily customized.
  • Rails Integration
    Built specifically for Ruby on Rails applications, Active Admin leverages Rails conventions and integrates seamlessly with its ecosystem, enabling a familiar and efficient development experience for Rails developers.
  • Rich Features
    Active Admin comes with a wide range of features like authentication, authorization, filtering, searching, and custom actions which can be customized to fit business requirements.
  • Community and Documentation
    Active Admin has a strong community and well-maintained documentation which provides support and resources for developers. The community contributes by sharing plugins and solutions to common problems.

Possible disadvantages of Active Admin

  • Customization Complexity
    Once you move beyond basic customizations, making extensive changes to the default behavior or appearance can be complex and require a deeper understanding of both Active Admin and Rails.
  • Performance
    Due to the abstraction and additional layers provided by Active Admin, it might not be the best choice for high-performance applications, especially when dealing with large datasets.
  • Dependency on Rails
    Active Admin is tightly coupled with Rails, which means it cannot be used for non-Rails applications, limiting its use for projects not based on this framework.
  • Version Compatibility
    As both Rails and Active Admin evolve, there might be compatibility issues between different versions, which could require upgrades or modifications in your existing codebase.

Laravel Nova videos

LARAVEL NOVA VS LARAVEL BACKPACK ⚔ HONEST REVIEW

More videos:

  • Review - Laravel Nova Overview
  • Review - LKnet | Why we Decidided to Switch from Wordpress to Laravel Nova

Active Admin videos

Harry Potter and the Active Admin

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Laravel Nova and Active Admin)
Developer Tools
62 62%
38% 38
Web Frameworks
100 100%
0% 0
No Code
0 0%
100% 100
Productivity
60 60%
40% 40

User comments

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Social recommendations and mentions

Laravel Nova might be a bit more popular than Active Admin. We know about 15 links to it since March 2021 and only 12 links to Active Admin. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Laravel Nova mentions (15)

  • Goravel: A Go framework inspired by Laravel
    Same reason IDEs — when you really know them — allow for quicker development compared to using primitive text editors with a bunch of third-party plugins duck-taped together. When you understand the framework, everything is written to the same standard, behaves in similar ways, and is where you expect it to be. Adding things like background job processing requires changing one line of config. Also, one... - Source: Hacker News / 3 months ago
  • Laravel Ecosystem in 2024
    Laravel Nova: Laravel Nova is an easy-to-use admin panel for Laravel applications with a clean design. It provides an intuitive UI for managing application data and creating custom dashboards. With Nova, developers can easily build CRUD interfaces, manage relationships, and add custom tools. - Source: dev.to / 9 months ago
  • Creating a CRM from scratch in wordpress, how hard would it be?
    If you're insistent on php, use Laravel Nova, or better yet, something like Odoo. Source: about 2 years ago
  • Would love some CMS suggestions for an for existing Laravel app
    Laravel ecosystem itself provides you with Nova. It's perfect for. Source: about 2 years ago
  • Am new to PhP and Laravel and my company wants me to code in it.
    But if this is simply "We need a CRUD app", you should look at Laravel Nova to cut down on a lot of work that people have done a million times before. Source: about 2 years ago
View more

Active Admin mentions (12)

  • Goravel: A Go framework inspired by Laravel
    Same reason IDEs — when you really know them — allow for quicker development compared to using primitive text editors with a bunch of third-party plugins duck-taped together. When you understand the framework, everything is written to the same standard, behaves in similar ways, and is where you expect it to be. Adding things like background job processing requires changing one line of config. Also, one... - Source: Hacker News / 3 months ago
  • Use Rails
    Rails is absolutely fantastic for projects below 10,000 lines with 1 or 2 contributors, especially if you want a classic forms-based UI. And you can get a huge amount done under those constraints in Rails. But as of couple of years ago, Rails came with a number of drawbacks: 1. There was no really viable system of static typing that a significant number of people were enthusiastic about. See... - Source: Hacker News / about 1 year ago
  • Ask HN: Why aren't Django Admin style dashboards popular in other frameworks?
    Can you clarify what's the "tremendous value" you're getting out of the Django admin? At Heii On-Call https://heiioncall.com/ we are using Active Admin https://activeadmin.info/ for Ruby on Rails, which seems quite similar to the Django admin. In my experience, it's mostly useful as a fairly basic read-only view of what's in the database. In Rails, it's so easy to whip together a custom view that we tend to do... - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
  • View code coverage (active_admin and orther .arb file)
    For those who know [https://activeadmin.info/](https://activeadmin.info/) it uses a file format [https://github.com/activeadmin/arbre](https://github.com/activeadmin/arbre). Source: over 2 years ago
  • Show HN: Build Ruby on Rails apps 10x faster – Avo
    Very neat! My first thought was that this was a competitor to https://bullettrain.co/. Looking into it a bit more, it seems more aimed at building admin panels than whole apps. I guess it competes against tools like https://activeadmin.info/? - Source: Hacker News / almost 3 years ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Laravel Nova and Active Admin, you can also consider the following products

Laravel Voyager - The missing Laravel admin

Jet Admin - Build business apps really fast

Laravel Kit - Desktop Laravel admin panel app with no configuration needs

Thoughtbot Administrate - Administrate is a library for Rails apps that automatically generates admin dashboards.

Tailwind CSS - A utility-first CSS framework for rapidly building custom user interfaces.

Avo - Prevent human errors when implementing analytics