Symfony: EasyAdmin and Sonata

Symfony has two well-established answers here, sized for different jobs.

EasyAdmin generates a clean CRUD interface from a Doctrine entity with minimal configuration, aimed squarely at “I need an admin screen this week.”

composer require easycorp/easyadmin-bundle
php bin/console make:admin:dashboard
php bin/console make:admin:crud

use EasyCorp\Bundle\EasyAdminBundle\Config\Crud;
use EasyCorp\Bundle\EasyAdminBundle\Field\TextField;
use EasyCorp\Bundle\EasyAdminBundle\Field\MoneyField;

class ProductCrudController extends AbstractCrudController
{
    public static function getEntityFqcn(): string
    {
        return Product::class;
    }

    public function configureFields(string $pageName): iterable
    {
        yield TextField::new('name');
        yield MoneyField::new('price')->setCurrency('USD');
        yield AssociationField::new('category');
    }
}

Sonata Admin is the heavier, older, and more extensible option: more configuration up front, but built to handle complex permission rules, nested admin relationships, and highly customized workflows that EasyAdmin isn’t designed to stretch to.

When to reach for each

EasyAdmin for most internal tools: fast to set up, easy to read, sufficient for the majority of CRUD-shaped admin needs. Sonata when the admin panel itself is a serious piece of the product, with complex permissions or deeply nested relationships that need more structure than EasyAdmin’s simpler model provides.

When it’s the wrong fit

A public customer-facing dashboard, same caveat as Filament: both tools are built for internal, trusted-user administration, not consumer product surfaces.

Under the hood: Both bundles read Doctrine’s entity metadata (the same annotations or attributes that define your database schema) to infer field types automatically. A price column typed as decimal in your entity becomes a numeric field in the admin with no extra declaration, because the framework already knows the type.