Laravel 12 Starter Kits: Ultimate Guide Which to Choose

If you install Laravel 12, you are immediately prompted to choose the starter kit. What if you don't know much about those options? Also, there are MORE options that are not listed in this wizard.

This guide will help you choose.

Why You (May) Need a Starter Kit?

First, let's talk about the purpose and advantage of using them.

With starter kits, you're getting the visual Auth functionality:

Login/Register pages
Skeleton for Dashboard and Menu items
Features like Forgot Password and Edit Profile
Pages for Email Verification
Blade components for re-usable elements

A few screenshots from one of the official starter kits:

Without starter kits, you will still get the Laravel core Auth back-end functionality but no visual login/registration pages.

So, a starter kit is almost necessary if you need user-based functionality in your Laravel web app. Otherwise, you would need to do a lot of manual work to create those forms yourself.

Notice: if you work with Laravel for the API project, choose "None" starter kit. At the moment, there's no specific API starter kit officially released.

Now, let's talk about which starter kit to choose.

Option 1. Official Starter Kits: React / Vue / Livewire

These options are suitable if you're comfortable with any of those three frameworks.

For CSS, all three starter kits use Tailwind 4.

For visual components, React / Vue options use Shadcn under the hood. Livewire starter kit uses Livewire's own Flux UI library and its free components.

You may read more about those in the official Laravel docs.

Also, we have a course about each of them if you want to dive deeper:

Option 2. "Just Blade" Starter Kits: Laravel Breeze or UI

If you don't need the SPA behavior in your web application, and/or you're not that deep into JS or Livewire, you may use one of the "older" starter kits:

Laravel Breeze
Laravel UI
Laravel Jetstream (discussed separately a bit below)

They are first-party starter kits released in earlier Laravel versions. The main question I keep hearing is: "Are they still supported?"

The answer is this: "Older" starter kits are not mentioned in the Laravel 12 docs and are not "advertised" on the homepage, but they still work with Laravel 12. As Taylor Otwell promised on Twitter (can't find the exact tweet, unfortunately), they will still be maintained and upgraded to the latest Laravel versions.

With Laravel Breeze, you will get a Tailwind v3 design like this:

You can install Laravel Breeze by choosing "None" in the installation wizard and then doing composer require laravel/breeze --dev.

More details:

With an even older Laravel UI starter kit, you will get a very simple Bootstrap design like this:

The core Laravel team hasn't worked with Bootstrap for many years, preferring Tailwind, but this starter kit is still upgraded to work with Laravel 12.

The installation process is the same: choose "None" starter kit, and then follow the instructions from GitHub.

Option 3. Starter Kit with Teams and 2FA: Laravel Jetstream

Another "older-but-still-supported" first-party starter kit is Laravel Jetstream.

It has more features on top of the ones already mentioned:

Team Management
Two-factor Authentication

JetStream is not a "just Blade" starter kit. It has two stack options: Livewire or Vue Inertia.

The installation process is similar to Breeze/UI: choose the "None" starter kit and then follow the official installation instructions.

More details: How to Install JetStream in Laravel 12

Option 4. Community Starter Kits

In Laravel 12 and the latest Laravel Installer, it became possible for anyone to create their starter kit and then use it like this:

laravel new --using=your-vendor/your-starter-kit-name

That feature is called community starter kits.

Here's my video on how it works.

Since then, quite a few kits have been released. Here are a few compiled lists:

We also recently released our own Laravel Daily Blade-only starter kit. Here's a video demo.

So, is the choice clearer now? Let me know in the comments if you still have any questions!

Markus

2 weeks ago

Thank you for that useful summary - for me as a beginner I wondered, if I am doing something wrong to start with a starter kit like breeze and for that reason I skipped to livewire. But that was in my case to complex to understand the essentials of laravel.

👍 2

Yan Penalva (hiyan)

Thank you for your summary! Here is my recommendation for my starter kit that uses Laravel 12 and Vue/Quasar Framework: https://github.com/yanpenalva/starter-kit-laravue https://packagist.org/packages/yanpenalva/starter-kit-laravue

Povilas Korop

@Markus yes that's exactly what I noticed that people think that using Breeze is somehow wrong. It isn't.

alsuara

Thank you for your post. Is very enlightening. I understand that everything mentioned in this post refers to new Laravel projects. I have a Laravel 11 project using the Livewire UI starter kit (Livewire and Bootstrap). Is there any semi-automatic way to migrate to the Livewire starter kit (with Tailwind) as I am planning to upgrade to Laravel 12 or I just need to install Tailwind 4 and start using it, for example, in a new Module?

Modestas

Starter kits are not meant to be updated. So there's no easy way to do the update.

That said, to upgrade tailwind version, you can use the tailwindcss updgrade tool ( https://tailwindcss.com/docs/upgrade-guide#using-the-upgrade-tool ). But other than that - it's manual work.

Thank you very much @Modestas

Hello @Modestas, I have just been watching at you wonderful video tutorial about schema drawing tools, and I liked very much how you did it (pointer & clicking, you in the lower right angle...). Could you give some tips about how you did that video? Thanks and best regards.