Bootstrap Admin Templates in 2026: Six Still Built on Bootstrap 5.3
By Mark Fail · · Updated
Most admin panels start the same way. Someone needs a screen to approve orders or edit users by Friday, a developer grabs a free template, and four years later that template is still running in production with a jQuery plugin nobody wants to touch.
So I judged these on upkeep more than looks. On 7 October 2026 I checked each one's latest release, the Bootstrap version underneath, the licence and the chart library it ships with. The chart library mattered more than I expected. Two names you may know from older lists are missing, and the reason is in the section before the final thoughts.
At a glance
| Template | Price | Licence | Last release | Versions | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bootstrap Dashboard example | Free | MIT | Aug 2025 | One HTML page | Small internal tools |
| AdminLTE 4 | Free | MIT | 1 Oct 2026 | HTML, React, Vue, Laravel, .NET | Free projects you'll keep for years |
| Tabler | Free | MIT, charts separate | 28 Sep 2026 | HTML | A polished free SaaS back office |
| CoreUI | Free, PRO $69 | MIT | 10 Aug 2026 | HTML, React, Vue, Angular | Teams that may want a paid tier later |
| Metronic | $49, SaaS $969 | Envato | 4 Jun 2026 | Bootstrap and Tailwind lines | Agencies that want many demos |
| Velzon | $25, SaaS $699 | Envato | 19 Mar 2026 | About 20 stacks | Django, Laravel or .NET backends |
Bootstrap example
Start with the one the Bootstrap team gives away. The Dashboard example is a single page with a dark top bar, a fixed left sidebar, a weekly line chart and a striped table filled with placeholder words like "random" and "irrelevant". That is the whole thing. Its JavaScript file draws one chart, using Chart.js 4.3.2 loaded from jsDelivr.
For a tool that five colleagues will use, I would begin here and add screens as they are needed. There is nothing to strip out and nothing to keep patched except Bootstrap itself. A small colour-mode script gives you a dark mode switch in the bottom corner. The page comes in the examples zip on the Bootstrap 5.3.8 release, which npm still lists as the latest Bootstrap, published on 26 August 2025. It is free and MIT licensed.
Pros
- Nothing to delete before you start
- Only one dependency to keep updated
- Dark mode switch already wired up
- Easy to read end to end in an afternoon
Cons
- One page only, with no login, forms or settings screens
- Chart.js is pinned to an older 4.3.2 build on a CDN
- Every widget beyond a chart and a table is yours to build
AdminLTE
AdminLTE is what most people mean by a free admin template, and it has 45,640 GitHub stars to back that up.
Version 4 is a rewrite on Bootstrap 5.3 with jQuery gone. The old plugins folder went with it. The migration guide names a vanilla replacement for each v3 widget, so Select2 becomes Tom Select and DataTables becomes Tabulator. If you have a v3 panel in production, treat the move as a rebuild. The demo opens on Dashboard v1 with four coloured stat boxes, a Chart.js area chart and a jsVectorMap world map, and there is a "Filter menu" box at the top of the sidebar that searches the navigation as you type. React, Vue, Laravel and ASP.NET Core editions live in their own repositories.
Read the security note before you deploy. An old record, CVE-2021-36471, still carries a 9.8 critical score on NVD and still shows up in some scanners. The AdminLTE team disputes it because it describes demo pages left on live servers, and the README now tells you to ship only the compiled files in dist. Version 4.10.0 came out on 1 October 2026 under the MIT licence.
Pros
- No jQuery in version 4
- The most framework editions of the free options
- A named replacement for every v3 plugin
- Released again six days before I checked
Cons
- Moving from v3 to v4 is closer to a rebuild than an upgrade
- The design is easy to recognise as AdminLTE
- The disputed CVE still trips some security scanners
- Demo pages must be kept off the live server
Tabler
Tabler looks the most finished of the free four. Its demo uses a white top navigation bar instead of a sidebar, with a welcome card, a gauge for active users and small sparkline cards for sales, revenue and new clients. There are more than 120 demo pages, including sign-in and error screens. I tested the sign-in page on its own in our roundup of HTML and CSS login form templates. Bootstrap 5.3.8 sits inside Tabler's own source tree, so a project loads one CSS file and one JS file.
Tabler shipped four releases in September. Version 1.6.0 added a password strength meter, an OTP input and a solid 2px focus outline, and it cut about 110 kB from the CSS.
The licence needs a closer look. Tabler's code is MIT, but its charts use ApexCharts, and npm shows ApexCharts switching away from MIT at version 5.2.0 in July 2025. Tabler moved to ApexCharts 7 at the end of August and added a warning to its docs. According to the Tabler README, organisations under $2M in yearly revenue can use ApexCharts free and larger ones pay. Swap in a different chart library if that rules you out. Tabler 1.6.1 was released on 28 September 2026, and the repository has 41,823 stars.
Pros
- The most polished design of the free options
- More than 120 demo pages, auth screens included
- Dark mode and RTL stylesheets for every component
- Frequent releases with real accessibility fixes
Cons
- ApexCharts is no longer MIT and may need a paid licence
- A banner on the demo sells a $69 bundle of paid extras
- The default demo uses top navigation, which suits shallow menus better than deep ones
CoreUI
CoreUI works a little differently. The template sits on @coreui/coreui, a component library built on Bootstrap 5.3.8 that adds parts Bootstrap lacks, such as loading buttons and a search button. You are tied to that library as well as to Bootstrap. The demo has a dark sidebar, four stat cards in purple, blue, yellow and red, and a Traffic chart drawn with Chart.js, which is still MIT.
The free template exists in Bootstrap HTML, React, Vue and Angular, each in its own repo. The HTML pages are written in Pug, so expect a build step before you can edit plain markup. The repo also ships a .cursorrules file and an ARCHITECTURE.md for AI coding tools.
In March 2025 a user opened a GitHub issue saying questions on the free repo had gone unanswered for more than a year. A maintainer replied the same day that the project is actively developed and pointed to the commits and releases. The code does keep moving, but the free repo is not a help desk. Paid support comes with PRO, which is $69 for one project with 6 months of updates. The free template is MIT, has 12,249 stars, and version 5.6.0 was released on 10 August 2026.
Pros
- The same template in four frameworks
- Charts use Chart.js, which stays MIT
- A $69 paid tier if you outgrow the free one
- Context files for AI coding assistants included
Cons
- Pug templates instead of plain HTML
- Questions on the free repository can go unanswered
- Data Grid and Scheduler appear in the free sidebar but are paid add-ons
- CoreUI-specific components tie you to their library
Metronic
Metronic from KeenThemes is the best-selling admin template on ThemeForest. It is also two products now. Metronic 9 is built on Tailwind CSS 4, and the Bootstrap version is the older Metronic 8 line with 64 HTML demos. One purchase gets you both.
The Bootstrap demo I loaded has a dark sidebar listing 17 dashboards, from eCommerce to Online Courses. Floating Prebuilts, Get Help and Buy Now buttons hang off the right edge, and a promo for a hosted environment fills the bottom of the page.
Read the buyer comments before you commit to the Bootstrap side. In September a buyer asked about promised v8 fixes and was told there was no confirmed release date. Another reported this week that keenthemes.com timed out in every browser. The Regular licence does not cover a product whose users pay, and a reply to a SaaS buyer in the comments said the same. Metronic costs $49, or $969 for the Extended licence, and has 120,369 sales with a 4.89 rating from 8,100 reviews. The item was last updated on 4 June 2026.
Pros
- 64 Bootstrap demos plus the Tailwind version in one purchase
- The largest buyer base of any admin template
- Starter kits for Angular, Vue, Laravel and ASP.NET Core
- $49 is cheap for the amount of layout work included
Cons
- New work goes into the Tailwind line, not Bootstrap
- A paid SaaS needs the $969 Extended licence
- Buyers report the vendor site timing out
- No release date for the promised v8 fixes
Velzon
Velzon from Themesbrand has the longest stack list I found. The same design ships in about 20 versions, from plain HTML and PHP to React, Next.js, Angular 21, Vue 3, Laravel 13, Django, Flask, ASP.NET Core 8, Svelte, Symfony and Yii2. If your backend team writes Django and wants the screens already split into Django templates, that list is the reason to buy it.
The demo greets "Anna" over an ecommerce dashboard with earnings, orders and customer cards, a teal bar chart and a sales map. On first load a theme customizer slides in with vertical, horizontal, two-column and semi-box layouts.
The buyer comments show where the edges are. Over the past two months several buyers hit CORS errors because the demo's API calls went to a Themesbrand server that was down, and one found that the change-password page was not connected to a database at all. Plan to write the auth logic yourself. It runs on Bootstrap 5.3.6, two patch releases behind. Velzon costs $25, or $699 Extended, and has 14,376 sales with a 4.62 rating from 419 reviews. The last update was on 19 March 2026.
Pros
- The cheapest Regular licence here
- About 20 framework and backend versions of one design
- 165+ pages and 6 dashboards
- Dark mode and RTL in most versions
Cons
- Auth pages are screens, not working logic
- Some demo code calls the vendor's own API server
- Bootstrap 5.3.6 rather than 5.3.8
- No update since March
Before you pick
Gentelella and Adminator used to appear on every free Bootstrap admin list. Both have dropped Bootstrap in their version 4 rewrites.
Gentelella 4 is vanilla JavaScript and SCSS built with Vite, and its README says there is no Bootstrap and no jQuery. Adminator 4 went the same way and cut its production JavaScript from about 4.5 MB to about 700 KB. Its old Bootstrap code lives on a legacy-v3 branch that still gets security fixes. Neither is a bad template. They just aren't Bootstrap templates any more, so open the package.json before you trust a listing title.
Then look at the charts. Chart.js is MIT. ApexCharts was MIT up to version 5.0.0 and has used its own licence since 5.2.0, so any template that bundles a recent ApexCharts brings that licence with it.
Last, the template's own licence. Envato's Regular licence covers one end product that users are not charged for, which rules out most SaaS dashboards. On Metronic or Velzon that means $969 or $699 instead of $49 or $25. The four free options here are MIT and have no such rule.
Final thoughts
For a small internal tool, take Bootstrap's own Dashboard example and add screens as people ask for them. It will still be easy to read in five years.
For a free panel you expect to keep, AdminLTE 4 is the safest bet. It has the biggest community, it released this month, and it has editions for most backends. Tabler is the better-looking free choice and has the stronger accessibility work in its recent releases, but check the ApexCharts terms against your company's revenue first. CoreUI makes sense if you want React, Vue or Angular versions of the same design and might pay for PRO later.
Metronic and Velzon are for teams that would rather buy 150 finished screens than build 20. Velzon fits when the backend stack decides everything. Metronic fits when you want the biggest library of layouts and can live with its Bootstrap line getting less attention. Either way, budget for the Extended licence if your users pay.
FAQ
Sources
- Bootstrap 5.3 Dashboard example and examples download: page contents, Chart.js version. Checked on 7 October 2026.
- bootstrap on npm: latest version 5.3.8 and its publish date. Checked on 7 October 2026.
- AdminLTE on GitHub: stars, v4 changes, security note, release 4.10.0. Checked on 7 October 2026.
- NVD record for CVE-2021-36471: score and dispute note. Checked on 7 October 2026.
- Tabler on GitHub, its releases and pull request 2917: stars, 1.6.0 and 1.6.1 changes, ApexCharts licence note. Checked on 7 October 2026.
- apexcharts on npm and chart.js on npm: licence per version. Checked on 7 October 2026.
- CoreUI free template on GitHub and issue 618: stars, frameworks, Pug templates, release 5.6.0, support complaint. Checked on 7 October 2026.
- Gentelella on GitHub and Adminator on GitHub: version 4 rewrites without Bootstrap. Checked on 7 October 2026.
- r/webdev: What is the best admin template to be allowed for open source projects?
- r/Frontend: Open source Bootstrap 5 HTML dashboard template
- r/bootstrap: Clean dashboard template
- YouTube: How To Create Admin Dashboard Using Bootstrap 5, CodzSword
