head to head · open source
filament vs beacon
filament has 32,078 GitHub stars, 4,209 forks, 26 open issues and last shipped yesterday. beacon has 1,260 stars, 135 forks, 70 open issues and last shipped 19 days ago. filament leads on adoption by 2,446% (32,078 vs 1,260 stars). filament is written in PHP under MIT; beacon is written in Elixir under MIT. filament has attracted 13% as many forks as stars, beacon 11%. filament was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (cms), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| filament | beacon | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 32K | ★ 1.3K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | PHP | Elixir |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-08-30 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.2K | ⑂ 135 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick filament if
- You weight community size — 32K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches PHP
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick beacon if
- You want the beacon feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Elixir
- You evaluated both and beacon fits your workflow better
About filament
Filament is a free, MIT licensed UI framework for Laravel, built on Livewire, that gives PHP developers a cohesive set of components for building applications and admin panels quickly.
read the full filament overview →
About beacon
Beacon Beacon is a content management system (CMS) built with Phoenix LiveView. It brings the rendering speed benefits of Phoenix to even the most content heavy pages with faster render times to boost SEO performance. Getting Started Install both Phoenix and Igniter installers: Now you can either create a new Phoenix project with Beacon or add Beacon to an existing Phoenix project: Create a new project Using latest published beacon and beacon live admin packages: Or using the unreleased projects from GitHub from the main branch: Replace my app and my site with the names you want to generate and follow the prompts…
read the full beacon overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is filament or beacon more popular?
filament has 32,078 GitHub stars and beacon has 1,260. filament has the larger community by that measure.
Are filament and beacon free?
Both are open source. filament is licensed under MIT and beacon under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between filament and beacon?
filament is written in PHP and beacon in Elixir. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, filament or beacon?
Choose filament if you want the larger community (32,078 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose beacon if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.