Pollora vs Acorn, Sage, Radicle and Corcel

Short answer: pick Sage for a modern theme on an ordinary WordPress site, Acorn to bring Laravel components into an existing WordPress install, Radicle for the Roots stack prepackaged as a ready-made project, and Corcel when a Laravel app only needs to read WordPress data. Pick Pollora for the opposite arrangement: a Laravel application that boots first and runs WordPress inside it, with hooks, post types and REST routes declared as PHP attributes.

Built on what Roots started

Roots has shaped modern WordPress development for over a decade, and it is a real source of inspiration for Pollora. Bedrock showed that WordPress belongs in a Composer-managed project, Sage brought Blade and a modern build to themes, and Acorn proved that Laravel and WordPress can share a codebase. Pollora builds on that work directly:

• themes, blocks and plugins are built with @roots/vite-plugin (WordPress dependency extraction and theme.json generation);
• the framework uses roots/bedrock-autoloader, and the project follows a Bedrock-style layout;
• the Blade layer ships Sage Directives (@posts, @title, @content, from log1x/sage-directives).

Pollora’s own WordPress models are built on pollora/colt, a fork of Corcel. The projects on this page are not rivals so much as different answers to the same question. This page says where each one fits.

At a glance

	Pollora	Acorn	Sage	Radicle	Corcel
What it is	A framework: a Laravel application that runs WordPress	A package that brings Laravel components into WordPress	A WordPress starter theme	A WordPress starter combining the Roots stack (Acorn, Bedrock, Sage, optional Trellis)	Eloquent models over the WordPress database
Architecture	Laravel boots first; WordPress (admin, database, plugins, REST API) runs inside the Laravel app	WordPress boots first; Acorn is booted from a theme’s functions.php or a plugin	A theme loaded by WordPress, using Acorn	WordPress first, with Acorn, in a Bedrock layout	Your Laravel (or other PHP) app reads the WordPress tables; WordPress is not booted
Routing	Laravel routes, Route::wp() on WordPress conditional tags, then the template hierarchy as fallback	Laravel routes alongside WordPress	WordPress template hierarchy, rendered with Blade	Laravel routes, through Acorn	Your application’s own routes
Templating	Blade themes with Sage Directives, Vite and Tailwind CSS; block themes also supported	Blade	Blade, Tailwind CSS, Vite	Blade, through Sage	Your own front end
Post types and hooks	PHP 8 attributes (#[PostType], #[Taxonomy], #[Action], #[Filter], #[WpRestRoute], #[Schedule]…), auto-discovered	Your theme or plugin code	Your theme code	Post types and taxonomies in config/post-types.php	Read access to existing data
Blocks	pollora:make:block, rendered with Blade	Your build	Your build	make:block, server-side rendering	n/a
Testing	Laravel’s testing tools	Laravel’s testing tools	Your setup	Pest, Playwright, linting in GitHub Actions	Your app’s tests
AI tooling	Nectar: guidelines, 9 agent skills and 10 MCP tools, on Laravel Boost
License and price	MIT, free	MIT, free	MIT, free	One-time purchase: $80 for one site, $240 for unlimited sites	MIT, free
Maturity (October 2026)	v13.34.1 stable, a young project	v6.3.0, about 2.66M Packagist installs	v11.2.1, about 13.3k GitHub stars	Commercial product from Roots	v9.0.0, about 4.8k GitHub stars

Sources: each project’s GitHub repository, Packagist and product page (roots.io/acorn, roots.io/radicle), checked on 1 October 2026.

Pollora and Acorn

Choose Acorn if you already have a WordPress site, theme or plugin and want Laravel’s container, Blade, Eloquent, queues, migrations and commands without changing how the site is structured. Acorn is installed with composer require roots/acorn and booted from your theme or plugin, so WordPress stays in charge of the request. It is mature, maintained by the Roots team, widely used, and its WP-CLI integration (wp acorn) fits existing WordPress workflows.

Pollora takes the inverse route. The project is a Laravel application: public/index.php is Laravel’s front controller, routes/web.php is checked first, and WordPress is loaded inside it to serve the admin, the database and the plugins. Registration code becomes attributes that are discovered automatically: a class with #[PostType] becomes a post type, a method with #[Action('init')] becomes an action. Route::wp() lets a Laravel route match a WordPress conditional tag such as is_singular (see WordPress Routes).

Acorn slots into any WordPress site; Pollora is a project layout you start from.

Pollora and Sage

Choose Sage if you are building a theme for a standard WordPress install and want Blade, Tailwind CSS and a Vite build with hot reloading. Sage is the most popular project on this page and the reference for modern WordPress themes.

Pollora is an application framework rather than a theme. Pollora themes use the same ingredients, Blade, Vite, Tailwind CSS and Sage Directives (see Theme Structure), but they sit inside a Laravel app that also owns routing, controllers, middleware, queues, and the post types, hooks and REST routes declared as attributes.

If you only need a theme, Sage is the simpler choice.

Pollora and Radicle

Radicle is the closest project to Pollora: a complete, Laravel-powered WordPress starter from the Roots team.

Choose Radicle if you want the Roots stack prepackaged, with Bedrock’s structure, Acorn, Sage, optional Trellis for servers, and the tooling already wired: Pest, Playwright end-to-end tests, linting in GitHub Actions, and block scaffolding with make:block. It is a one-off purchase that also supports the Roots team’s work.

Pollora covers the same ground and goes further in a few places:

• Laravel first. WordPress runs inside the Laravel application instead of Laravel running inside WordPress, so routing, middleware and the request lifecycle are Laravel’s.
• Attributes and auto-discovery for post types, taxonomies, hooks, REST routes, WP-CLI commands, schedules, AJAX handlers and abilities, where Radicle registers post types and taxonomies in a configuration file.
• Route::wp(): Laravel routes matched on WordPress conditional tags, with the template hierarchy as a fallback.
• AI tooling: Nectar gives coding agents guidelines, skills and MCP tools for the project.
• Free and MIT-licensed.

Both use a Bedrock-style layout (in Pollora, WordPress core in public/cms and wp-content in public/content; see Server Configuration) and install WordPress core and plugins with Composer.

Pollora and Corcel

Choose Corcel if your main application is a Laravel (or other PHP) app and WordPress is only a back office: Corcel gives you Eloquent models over the WordPress tables, so you can read posts, pages, terms, users and meta from your app. It is MIT-licensed and widely used.

Pollora runs WordPress itself. Hooks fire, plugins load, the admin and the REST API work, and the front end can still rely on the template hierarchy. Pollora’s WordPress models (Pollora\Models\Post, Page, Attachment, Term, User, Menu…) are built on pollora/colt, a fork of Corcel, so Corcel-style queries remain available inside a Pollora app.

Coming from Sage or Acorn

There is no dedicated migration guide yet. What carries over directly:

• Blade templates, including Sage Directives such as @posts, @title and @content.
• Tailwind CSS and Vite, with @roots/vite-plugin generating theme.json from your @theme design tokens (see Theme Structure).
• A Bedrock-style, Composer-managed project: WordPress core and plugins are Composer dependencies.
• ACF-style inner blocks: Pollora’s <InnerBlocks /> tag follows ACF’s, only the default wrapper class differs (see Gutenberg Blocks).

What changes: hooks and post types move from function calls or configuration to attribute classes, and the project becomes a Laravel application with WordPress inside it.

Next steps

• Install Pollora with pollora new example-app.
• Read Why Pollora for the reasoning and the trade-offs.
• Check the FAQ for requirements, hosting and plugins.