From Custom Admins to Filament: What I Learned as a Backend Developer
For a long time, I used to build admin panels completely from scratch with Blade. Every new CRUD meant hours of wiring together forms, validations, permissions, pagination, and a minimal UI that I had to craft manually.
It worked in the short term, but as projects grew, maintaining everything, dealing with technical debt, and adding new features became a real pain.
Recently, in one of my projects, I decided to give Filament a try. I mainly work on the backend (though I have frontend experience too), and from that perspective a few things immediately stood out:
Surprisingly fast development
A clean, opinionated structure that guides you in the right direction
Mature, ready-to-use form and table components
Easier customization than I expected
Reliable and well-written documentation
For example, building a Resource with several relations and filters — something that used to take around two full days — took me less than half a day with Filament.
Even parts I always used to build from scratch were much quicker and cleaner thanks to Filament’s built-in actions and widgets.
Of course, it’s not all perfect.
The biggest challenge for me was UI limitations, especially in projects that require very custom or unique designs. And to get stable, scalable results, you really need to be comfortable with Laravel’s structure and Filament’s architecture.
In enterprise-level projects, deep customization can also get tricky, so it’s something to consider upfront.
From a technical leader’s point of view, here’s the key question: Is migrating from a custom admin panel to Filament actually worth it?
Costs
Redesigning parts of the UI/UX
Migrating permission systems and security logic
Rewriting forms, fields, and resources
Potential need for custom components
More complexity for highly specialized enterprise projects
Benefits
Much faster feature development
A fully standardized and predictable admin structure
Lower maintenance costs in the mid-term
A more stable development experience for larger teams
Ready-to-use actions, widgets, and tooling
A strong community aligned with the Laravel ecosystem
My conclusion so far:
If your admin panel is constantly growing and you need something reliable and scalable, Filament is absolutely the more cost-effective choice in the long run.
But if your existing admin is heavily customized and visually unique, it’s worth carefully evaluating the UI and customization costs before migrating.