Pollora vs Acorn

Short answer: pick Acorn if you already have a WordPress site, theme or plugin and want Laravel’s components in it. Pick Pollora if you are starting a project and want it to be a Laravel application that runs WordPress inside it.

Both put Laravel’s container, routing, Blade and Eloquent next to WordPress, and both are MIT-licensed. They differ in which of the two is in charge of the request. This page goes deeper than the four-way comparison; for Sage, Radicle and Corcel, start there.

The one real difference: who boots first

Acorn: WordPress boots first. WordPress handles the request, and your theme or plugin starts Acorn from a hook. The Acorn docs describe it as “a way to gracefully load a Laravel application container inside of WordPress while respecting the WordPress lifecycle and template hierarchy”:

// functions.php of a theme (Sage and Radicle already do this for you)
use Roots\Acorn\Application;

add_action('after_setup_theme', function () {
    Application::configure()
        ->withProviders([App\Providers\ThemeServiceProvider::class])
        ->withRouting(web: base_path('routes/web.php'))
        ->boot();
}, 0);

Pollora: Laravel boots first. public/index.php is Laravel’s front controller. WordPress is loaded inside the application to provide the admin, the database, the plugins and the REST API, and a request goes through Laravel’s router before WordPress’s template hierarchy (see How Pollora runs WordPress inside Laravel).

Everything else on this page follows from that choice.

The same task, both ways

A custom post type, a WordPress hook, and a route.

With Acorn, the usual way is WordPress’s own functions, called from a service provider. The Roots team also publishes roots/acorn-post-types, which declares post types and taxonomies in a config/post-types.php file.

app/Providers/ThemeServiceProvider.php

public function boot(): void
{
    add_action('init', function () {
        register_post_type('event', [
            'label' => 'Events',
            'public' => true,
            'has_archive' => true,
            'supports' => ['title', 'editor', 'thumbnail'],
        ]);
    });
}

routes/web.php

Route::view('/welcome/', 'welcome')->name('welcome');

With Pollora, the post type and the hook are classes with attributes, discovered automatically:

#[PostType]
#[HasArchive]
#[Supports(['title', 'editor', 'thumbnail'])]
class Event {}

class Seo
{
    #[Action('init', priority: 20)]
    public function handleInit(): void
    {
        // runs on the WordPress init action
    }
}

// routes/web.php: a Laravel route, matched on a WordPress conditional tag
Route::wp('single', fn () => view('post'));

The Pollora version has less to register by hand. The Acorn version is plain WordPress code that any WordPress developer reads at once, and it needs no convention to learn. Which of the two is better depends on your team.

Side by side

	Pollora	Acorn
What it is	A framework: a Laravel application that runs WordPress	A package that loads Laravel components inside WordPress
Install	pollora new example-app or composer create-project pollora/pollora: a new project	composer require roots/acorn in an existing theme or plugin
Existing WordPress site	No migration guide yet: the site’s database, uploads and plugins move into a new Pollora project, and the theme is rewritten	Added to the site as it is
Routing	Laravel routes first, Route::wp() on WordPress conditional tags, then the template hierarchy as fallback	Laravel routes from routes/web.php, enabled with withRouting(); the docs recommend wp acorn route:cache when you deploy
Controllers and middleware	Yes (controllers, middleware)	Yes (documented)
Post types, hooks, REST routes	Attributes: #[PostType], #[Taxonomy], #[Action], #[Filter], #[WpRestRoute], #[Schedule], #[WpCli]	WordPress functions in your code; post types and user roles also have Roots packages (acorn-post-types, acorn-user-roles)
Eloquent and WordPress data	Models for WordPress posts, terms and users ship with Pollora	Eloquent is available; the docs show models you write for the WordPress tables
Queues and migrations	Laravel’s own, plus queued listeners on WordPress events	Documented: queue tables, jobs and migrations through wp acorn
Command line	php artisan (pollora:make:post-type, pollora:make:block…); WP-CLI commands declared with #[WpCli]	wp acorn runs Artisan commands through WP-CLI; custom commands become WP-CLI commands
Blocks	pollora:make:block, written in JSX and rendered with Blade	Blade views as render_callbacks, or a block.json render file (see the Acorn docs)
Media storage	Any Laravel disk with two settings (Media)	WordPress’s own uploads
WordPress Abilities API	pollora/abilities	roots/acorn-ai
License	MIT	MIT

Maturity

Acorn is the established project. The Roots team has worked on modern WordPress development since 2011, Sage and Radicle both run on Acorn, and it has a documentation site, a forum and a list of community packages (WooCommerce, ACF, mail, caching). It is the safe default for a WordPress-first project.

Pollora is younger, maintained by AmphiBee. It follows Laravel’s release line (v13.40.2 is built on Laravel 13.40), ships its own packages for the pieces a WordPress project needs, and is still growing its community and its ecosystem.

Choose Acorn if

• you have a WordPress site, theme or plugin that already exists and you do not want to move it;
• you want Sage (or Radicle) and its documented, widely used starting point;
• your team prefers plain WordPress functions for hooks and post types;
• you want the project with the longer track record and the larger ecosystem;
• WordPress should stay in charge of the request, which is what Acorn is built for.

Choose Pollora if

• you are starting a new project and want it to be a Laravel application, with WordPress as its CMS;
• you want Laravel to own routing, middleware and the request lifecycle, and Route::wp() to reach WordPress pages from it;
• you want hooks, post types, taxonomies, REST routes and schedules declared as attributes and registered automatically;
• you want WordPress media on S3, R2 or another Laravel disk, or Nectar for coding agents.

Coming from Acorn

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

• Blade templates, since both build on Laravel’s view layer;
• Tailwind CSS and Vite, and Sage Directives such as @posts, @title and @content;
• Controllers, middleware, jobs and migrations, which are Laravel code in both.

What changes: Laravel becomes the entry point instead of functions.php, wp acorn becomes php artisan, and hooks and post types move from function calls to attribute classes. Pollora is a new project: your content stays in the standard WordPress tables, and the plugins do not need changes.

Sources

Acorn: the Acorn documentation, the roots/acorn repository and its composer.json (v6.3.0). Pollora: this documentation and the Pollora repositories. All read on 6 November 2026. If something here is out of date, open an issue and we will correct it.

Next steps

• Install Pollora with pollora new example-app.
• Read the four-way comparison for Sage, Radicle and Corcel, and Why Pollora for the trade-offs.
• Not sure which way to combine Laravel and WordPress suits you? See six ways to integrate Laravel with WordPress.