head to head · open source
filament vs Craft CMS
filament has 32,397 GitHub stars, 4,237 forks, 26 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Craft CMS has 3,623 stars, 712 forks, 529 open issues and last shipped yesterday. filament leads on adoption by 794% (32,397 vs 3,623 stars). filament is written in PHP under MIT; Craft CMS is written in PHP under a custom or non-standard licence. filament has attracted 13% as many forks as stars, Craft CMS 20%. Craft CMS 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 | Craft CMS | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 32K | ★ 3.6K |
| License | MIT | Custom / other |
| Written in | PHP | PHP |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.2K | ⑂ 712 |
| 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 Craft CMS if
- You want the Craft CMS feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Custom / other license terms
- Your stack matches PHP
- You evaluated both and Craft CMS fits your workflow better
About filament
Build apps & admin panels fast, for your bright ideas. With a solid Laravel foundation and a polished UI, you can focus on what makes your product unique. Filament gives you UI components that you won't outgrow — a cohesive set of well considered building blocks that adapt as your application grows in complexity. Tables — Browse and filter large datasets with powerful columns, actions, and bulk operations. Forms — Build complex, reactive forms using a set of reusable, state aware components. Infolists — Render read only record views with structured layouts and custom formatting. Notifications — Trigger in app…
read the full filament overview →
About Craft CMS
About Craft CMS Craft is a flexible, user friendly CMS for creating custom digital experiences on the web and beyond. It features: An intuitive, user friendly control panel for content creation and administrative tasks. A clean slate approach to content modeling that doesn’t make any assumptions about the content you need to manage. A fast and flexible templating system based on Twig. An auto generated GraphQL API for building headless applications. A powerful ecommerce platform for building bespoke ecommerce experiences. A built in Plugin Store with hundreds of free and commercial plugins. A robust extension…
read the full Craft CMS overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is filament or Craft CMS more popular?
filament has 32,397 GitHub stars and Craft CMS has 3,623. filament has the larger community by that measure.
Are filament and Craft CMS free?
Both are open source. filament is licensed under MIT, and Craft CMS has no licence declared in this registry. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between filament and Craft CMS?
filament is written in PHP and Craft CMS in PHP. 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 Craft CMS?
Choose filament if you want the larger community (32,397 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose Craft CMS if its feature set, stack or Custom / other licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.