How to Find Best Laravel Packages in 2026 (Don't Ask ChatGPT)

Hello guys, how do you find best Laravel packages? Of course, you can ask Google or ask Chad GPT. But by the way, don't do that. I will show you later in this video why Chad GPT is the worst. But in this video, I want to present you updated page on Laravel Daily called best packages. Here's the menu item. And I have a vision or a wish for this to become central hub, something like product hunt for package releases because now I'm tracking the new releases. So let me show you what I have here. Now this is for free without any membership. So if you go to Laravel dailycom packages and search for example first there is a search there wasn't a search before. So you want to have something with rest api then you click into the package and then for each package I added quick description. So not the full readme some of the packages are just too big with information on readme and I want you to understand at a glance what the package does. So basically in one or two scrolls and if I have a video review about that package which I often do from this YouTube channel then I will link that also below that description. So that's one use case. Find a package and quickly understand what it does without reading the read me and if you prefer my videos then you can watch usually 5 to 10 minute review. Also latest version on the sidebar. So I'm crawling GitHub every day to have new versions and you can click on that new version and go directly to GitHub to see what changed in that new release or you can also click view on GitHub here to just go to the package GitHub. Now back to the package list. I have two kind of featured tables here. First latest added packages and I changed the logic the system how to be added on that list. So the list is here below. This is similar how it looked earlier on Laravel Daily with important new column latest version. One of the problems with packages is you cannot really see if the package is active, when was the last release or version or does it support Laravel 13 or newest version at the time. So yeah, from the date of latest version, you can kind of understand whether the package is active. And side note while doing the cleanup for this page I cleaned up also obsolete packages which were around 30 packages sadly were not updated to even Laravel 12. So yeah this number used to be like 240 something now it's 214 this is what I'm also doing kind of curation of the word best packages is not just for the shiny title or SEO benefit no I actually am curating. So what I used to have is minimum 100 stars for new packages. So you could then email me and I could add that package. Now I will of course monitor the community myself which I'm doing on Twitter but I will add packages even with 72 stars for example if I see that it's useful and you can submit your package here. This is the form with just you give the URL and description kind of a pitch to me what the package is about and what is the benefit and I will do my judgment. It's not like 100 GitHub stars minimum anymore, but some packages are just like too niche or too small or sometimes the packages created for that author from that author only by themselves and I already see I already feel that the package will not get traction or new packages sometimes are like 20th package on the same topic like 30th CRUD generator for Laravel. We don't need more CRUD generators I think in 2026. So I will not really accept all the packages but I will give the benefit of the doubt for newcomers even without many GitHub stars and also for featured version releases. Featured means something more important usually the version number with0 at the end. So not the bug fix not the small incremental version but something like version 8.0 or version 1.4. So again I will manually create the featured versions the more important versions for packages. Now let me show you my trick how to ask AI properly for what packages you may need in your specific project. So if you go to chat GPT and ask for best Laravel packages for something and that something should be based on your specific project you're working on right. So for example if you have a project description like this from client in markdown or whatever. So this was a real demo project I was working on. So, we have the business for car shipping and let's actually copy and paste the full description into chat GPT best Laravel packages for this project. And that's it. Paste and enter. And notice how quickly the answer arrives in like 5 seconds. And this is the basic list of packages. But from these packages, you don't see how many stars do they have, how popular are they updated. Best PHP is just included in Laravel. So I don't think it belongs to this list. So Chad GPT is giving general information and general recommendation from most popular packages and the packages it is trained on. And now let me show you what I'm doing personally if I'm searching for packages for a specific project in my AI workflows for Laravel repository which I talked about in previous video about my Laravel workflow with AI. This is 10-minute video a few months ago. So, I will link that in the description below. But basically, this is my prompt. Look at project description. Whatever documents you have and then suggest packages useful for this project with requirements here. You could technically copy and paste that into chat GPT. But the thing is if you have already a Laravel project installed with description which I usually do I do Laravel new and then get description MD into that project already choosing the text tag. So what starter kit do you use react view or live wire or no starter kit that context is important for AI agent. So if you prompt this and add the existing Laravel project context then the result may be totally different. So I prompt that into cloud code. And by the way, I'm using Solo by my friend Aaron Francis. Trying to use it for multiple projects and multiple agents at the same time. We'll maybe shoot a separate video on that, but I'm not affiliated or don't get paid for mentioning Solo, but this is the prompt just inside of Solo. So I can use Cloud Code here. I can use Codex in another project and stuff like that. And then cloud code is doing web search, but based on the information it found inside of already your codebase. And there we go. In a minute, we have the answer. And one of the sources, interestingly, is the same Laravel Daily packages website that I showed you. And now we have top 10 recommendations with context what the package should be used for. So these are the references to user stories document that I have inside of this project. Also, for example, Laravel settings then recommends filament Laravel settings viewer. Similarly, filament Laravel log for just viewing the logs. Some of the recommendations are generic and some you may skip. Usually out of 10 there are only five like good recommendations but with context. This is important. So cloud code or codeex would explain what you use this package for. And also importantly it filters for latest versions 2026 or something. So you get filtered actively maintained relevant packages. And that repository is free by the way and I will link that in the description below. You can just copy the prompt or if you don't want to ask cloud code, you can browse Laravel daily packages. This is where I started this video. Updated version of the package kind of list. I wanted to become kind of a replacement for pack list. So, I'm not sure if anyone saw that website. Maybe the older generation of Laravel developers used to browse here earlier. So, 2013 is the start of that. And it lists all the packages. So, 42,000 packages at the moment. There's also, of course, packages, but it's not really browsable easily. So, you can go for specific package like fillet check. Oh, wow. I haven't checked that for a while. 44,000 installers. Separate side note. So, you can browse, but it's not really easily filterable for Laravel. So, yeah, I would prefer something like Product Hunt where you can search for a package, but also see the new releases and up votes and stuff like that. Of course, I'm not pretending to be the same traffic source as Product Hunt, but basically this is a vision that I was trying to implement in the new updated version of this Laravel daily website page. So, visit that one. The link will be in the description below and tell me what features should I add here as well and share how you search or how do you discover new packages for Laravel for your projects. Let's discuss in the comments below. That's it for this time and see you guys in other