I need to build an admin panel that controls the activities of an eCommerce application and this has to have basic functionality like manage products, users etc. Which of these two would be most suitable for me?
I'm the creator of Backpack so I'm obviously biased. Voyager seems tailored more for presentation websites, whereas Backpack should allow a lot of complexity. At my company we've successfully built ERPs, CRMs, eLearning and eCommerce using Backpack. One of my companies has actually created a package to make it easier to develop eCommerce backends next time, maybe you can use it - https://github.com/updivision/estarter-ecommerce-for-laravel.
I personally haven't found a better solution to build an eCommerce on Laravel. In my mind eCommerce + Backpack = love. But again - I'm biased :-)
TBH I wanted voyager to work because it looks so nice and clean, well stylized and easy to use, is free etc
The issue is it does seem fragile, does seem a bit hard / unobvious how to override stuff, and (heinous sin, unless its been fixed) the CRUD/BREAD settings are stored in database columns, so kinda negates the use of migrations!
Backpack certainly seems to do the trick, have a few issues / complaints / niggles / features I'd like but generally does what I tell it to do, with less black magic but more hackability