Filament v5 vs v4: Should You Upgrade Yet?

“Should we upgrade?” usually means weighing new features against migration risk. Filament v5 changes that calculation, because on the Filament side there are no new features and very little risk. That makes the decision simpler than it looks, but it isn’t automatic. Here is how to make it for your app.

What’s actually different between Filament v4 and v5

The whole diff fits in one table:

That’s not a simplification. The v5 announcement states: “Apart from Livewire v4 support, Filament v5 has no additional changes over v4, and we’ll continue pushing features to both versions.” You can see it in the release history too: 5.8.4 and 4.13.4 were tagged on the same day with the same fixes.

So “v5 vs v4” is really “Livewire 4 vs Livewire 3”, plus how long each version is supported.

Support timelines: the deadline that matters

From Filament’s version support policy:

The date to plan around is 15 January 2027. After that, a Filament bug that affects you on v4 won’t be fixed upstream. There’s also a softer point to keep in mind: the policy accepts new-feature pull requests “only for the latest major version, except in special circumstances”. Features reaching v4 today is a choice the team is making, not something the policy promises.

What Livewire 4 gives a Filament app

If you only use stock Filament resources, you’ll notice very little. Livewire 4’s gains matter when you write your own Livewire code inside or next to the panel:

• Islands: parts of a component that re-render on their own. Useful on custom dashboards and report pages. See where islands help in Filament.
• Non-blocking wire:poll and parallel wire:model.live: these improve busy dashboards and live search without any code changes.
• Async actions (wire:click.async, #[Async]) for analytics pings and other fire-and-forget calls.
• defer loading and bundled lazy loading for components.
• Single-file components (PHP and Blade in one file) as the default for make:livewire.
• wire:sort, wire:intersect, wire:ref and the data-loading attribute for styling loading states.

There’s also an ecosystem effect. Some newer plugins are v5-only. For example, the Flowforge Kanban board targets Filament 5, and Relaticle Custom Fields requires Filament 5.0 or higher. The longer you stay on v4, the more often you’ll find a plugin you can’t install.

What the upgrade costs

On the Filament side, almost nothing: the upgrade guide lists no manual steps, and the script does the checking. On the Livewire side, it depends on how much custom Livewire you have. The Livewire 4 upgrade guide flags these high-impact changes:

• Renamed config keys (layout → component_layout, lazy_placeholder → component_placeholder)
• wire:model ignores events from child elements unless you add .deep
• <livewire:foo> tags must be closed
• .blur / .change modifiers delay client-side sync too (add .live for v3 behaviour)
• Endpoints moved to /livewire-{hash}/…, which matters for WAF and CDN rules

For a panel that’s 95% stock Filament, expect an hour or two. For an app with dozens of hand-written Livewire components and JavaScript hooks, expect a day of careful testing.

The decision matrix

Hidden costs of not upgrading

It’s easy to leave a working panel alone. These are the costs that pile up while you do:

1. Plugin drift. Maintainers are gradually dropping v4-only branches. Two releases from now, the plugin fix you need may be v5-only.
2. Livewire 3’s own support window. Filament supporting v4 doesn’t mean every other Livewire 3 package will keep up. The Livewire ecosystem is moving to v4.
3. AI tooling. Filament’s AI-assisted development docs note that Blueprint 2.x supports Filament v5, and most new examples, skills and community snippets now target v5. Agents write better code when the docs and examples match your version. Our guide to AI coding agent rules for Filament covers this in more depth.
4. Two upgrades at once. When Laravel 14 or Filament 6 arrives, you’ll be doing it from v4, which stacks two migrations together.

A sensible upgrade plan for a team

1. Week 1: audit. Run composer why-not filament/filament 5.0 and grep for Livewire 4 breaking patterns. Put the result in a ticket.
2. Week 1: branch. Run the upgrade script and fix the Livewire changes you found.
3. Week 2: test. Run the Pest suite plus a manual smoke test of custom pages and plugins. If you don’t have tests yet, add Filament Pest tests for your five most-used resources first. It’s the cheapest insurance there is.
4. Week 2: ship behind a staging soak. A few days of internal use catches the odd wire:model.blur case.
5. Afterwards: adopt Livewire 4 features where they clearly help. Don’t rewrite working code just to use islands.

Performance: is v5 faster?

Filament’s own rendering is the same in both versions. The differences come from Livewire 4: polling no longer blocks other requests, and live model updates run in parallel. A dashboard with several polling widgets will feel more responsive under load, and a table with a live search field will keep up with typing better. If your table is slow, though, the cause is almost always the query, not Livewire. Our 8 fixes for slow Filament tables will help more than a version bump.

The verdict

Filament v5 isn’t a “wait for the .1 release” upgrade. The Filament code is the same code you run today, and the new part (Livewire 4) has been stable since January 2026. Upgrade when your plugins allow it, and do it before January 2027 whatever happens. For most teams, that means doing it this quarter.

FAQ

Is Filament v5 stable enough for production?

Yes. It has been stable since 16 January 2026 and was on 5.8.x by September 2026. Its Filament code is the same as v4, which has been in production since summer 2025.

Does Filament v4 still get new features?

Currently, yes. The team says features are released to both v4 and v5. Officially, though, the support policy only accepts new-feature pull requests for the latest major version, so don’t count on this continuing.

When does Filament v4 reach end of life?

Bug fixes end on 15 January 2027, and security fixes end on 15 January 2028.

Do I need to rewrite my resources for v5?

No. Resources, schemas, tables and actions are identical. Only custom Livewire code may need changes for Livewire 4.

Can I use Filament v4 with Livewire 4?

No. Filament v4 requires Livewire 3. Filament v5 is the version that supports Livewire 4.

Sources and further reading

• Introducing Filament v5 and Filament Blueprint
• Filament version support policy
• Livewire 4 upgrade guide
• Filament releases on GitHub

• Filament v5 Lands with Livewire 4 Support

   

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