Advantages and disadvantages of current solutions for control panel development
Tags: discuss, opensource, github, development
Published: 2023-07-14 04:27:45

As you remember [we are looking for a tool](https://dev.to/mrbantsevich/need-an-advice-about-dashboard-creating-2oab) to create admins to automate routine tasks. 

While studying the proposed solutions, we have identified a final set of requirements:

1. We want a solution that creates CRUD (create, read, update, delete) quickly and requires minimal effort. 
2. We want to be able to create some sort of complex interface if the task requires it.
3. We make cool, beautiful projects, so we want a visually pleasing solution. 
4. We want the solution to be independent of the language on the back-end, because, for example, we started with PHP, Laravel, but over time node.js, Go appeared in the stack.

In short, we want fast, beautiful and custom. 

We've had time to poke at various off-the-shelf solutions that we've been advised. They're good, but:

- they are created specifically for some frameworks / languages like laravel, node.js
- they can only generate CRUDs with a rigidly defined structure, where you can't implement or customize anything of your own.
- they can't be styled

### Here's what we've been looking at

**Control Panels for Laravel:**
[Backpack](https://demo.backpackforlaravel.com/admin/dashboard)  Not a very pretty solution in our opinion. And the promo page has nice screenshots, not the demo "well such".
[RCHID](https://orchid.software/en/)  Not particularly functional, but neatly done
[Nova](https://nova.laravel.com)  They have a beautiful, but rigidly set structure, you can not create custom interfaces, stylize them. Just do CRUD and that's it. And it's [paid
Analog to Nova](https://filamentphp.com/), with essentially the same problems.

**For node.js:**
[AdminJS](https://adminjs.co)  Nice promo, and the demo is way behind

**Standalone dashboards:**
[Strapi](https://strapi.io/ ) Very cool, but for other purposes. It's more of an entity builder with an interface and API
[Pocketbase](https://pocketbase.io/)  Similarly, it's an entity builder with an interface and API
[Directus](https://directus.io/)  This is a backend builder.
[Filamentphp](https://filamentphp.com/)  It is purely for php, you can't customize styles, you can't create your own interfaces. It is possible to create only tables and forms by template, and we remember that we want flexibility, independence from the language and the ability to create their own interfaces and customize them
[Flatlogic](https://flatlogic.com)  This is also more of a backend builder.

**Direct competitors:**
[Refine](https://github.com/refinedev/refine ) 
[Marmelab](https://marmelab.com/react-admin/)  is probably the best solution that is currently on the market, they have been developing for a long time, they are our favorite. To the disadvantages we considered the following points: quite an old project, and somewhere the technology is already outdated, unsympathetic interface, old UI libraries. Huge documentation, it’s simply to create CRUD but hard to work without immersion.

> After all this there is only one conclusion: we need to do it ourselves.So stay tuned and subscribe if u'd like to find out what we've done.