Laravel Horizon alternatives, compared
Four tools, one dashboard path, and a great deal of confusion about which of them replaces what. Start
here: the table below says where each one sits relative to laravel/horizon,
because most of the wrong choices in this space are made by comparing tools that operate at different
layers.
What each one actually is
| Tool | Relationship to Horizon | Licence |
|---|---|---|
| Skyline for Laravel | Forks and replaces the package | $99 once, a year of upgrades |
| Laravel Horizon | Skyline replaces the package | Free, MIT |
| Deck | Runs alongside Horizon | Free, MIT (optional paid Deck Cloud) |
| Horizon New Dawn | Replaces the Horizon interface | Free, MIT (pre-1.0) |
Read that column carefully before anything else. Deck runs beside Horizon and keeps history in your database; New Dawn swaps out Horizon's interface and leaves the workers alone; Skyline becomes your Horizon install and can change what the workers themselves do. Only one of those three is a like-for-like alternative to the others.
The options that are not forks
Three of the choices people weigh against Horizon are not replacements for it, and one of them is doing nothing at all. They get no page of their own because there is no head-to-head to write — but leaving them out would make this list shorter than the decision actually is.
Replaces the dashboard with nothing
queue:work + Supervisor
The baseline every one of these tools is measured against. Supervisor keeps workers alive and that is all it does: no dashboard, no metrics, no failed-job browser, no way to see a backlog before a customer reports it. It is a genuinely reasonable choice for a small app with two queues, and a bad one the moment you cannot answer "is anything stuck?" without SSH.
Free, in the framework
Sits beside Horizon, not in place of it
An APM (Nightwatch, Datadog, Sentry)
These answer "what happened, and how bad is it" across the whole app, queues included, and they answer it far better than any queue dashboard will. They do not give you a button. When the alert fires at 2am you still need something that can pause the queue or drain the backlog — which is why the sensible setup is an APM *and* a queue tool, not one instead of the other.
Usage-based subscription
Reads the underlying keys directly
A Redis GUI (RedisInsight, TablePlus)
Everything Horizon shows is derived from Redis, so in principle you can read it at the source. In practice you are decoding serialised payloads by hand and there is no safe way to act on what you find. Useful for a forensic dig, not for operating a queue.
Free or one-off
The comparisons
Skyline replaces the package
Skyline for Laravel vs Laravel Horizon
Skyline is a fork of Horizon. Everything Horizon does still happens; the difference is what you can do about it.
Read the comparison →
Runs alongside Horizon
Skyline for Laravel vs Deck
Deck records what your jobs did, in your database. Skyline changes what your queues do, in Redis. They answer different questions.
Read the comparison →
Replaces the Horizon interface
Skyline for Laravel vs Horizon New Dawn
New Dawn replaces Horizon's interface and leaves the workers alone. Skyline replaces the package, workers included.
Read the comparison →
Every claim on these pages is checkable against the other project's own README or documentation, and we concede the points they win — there are several. If you find something out of date, tell us and we will fix it: these pages are only worth having if they are worth trusting.
Common questions
What are the alternatives to Laravel Horizon?
There are three projects in the same space and two non-answers worth knowing. Skyline for Laravel forks Horizon and replaces the package, keeping the dashboard and adding queue operations. Horizon New Dawn replaces Horizon's interface and leaves the workers untouched. Deck runs alongside Horizon and records job history in your database. The non-answers: plain queue:work under Supervisor, which is the baseline with no dashboard at all, and an APM such as Nightwatch or Datadog, which reports on your queues but cannot act on them.
Is there a free alternative to Laravel Horizon?
Horizon itself is the free option, and for most applications it is the right one — it is MIT-licensed, maintained by the Laravel core team and does the monitoring job well. The paid tools in this list exist for teams who have hit its edges, usually around operating a queue rather than watching one. If you have never wished you could pause a single queue or run a delayed job early, you do not need any of them.
Which Laravel Horizon alternative should I choose?
Start from what is missing rather than from the tools. If you want a better-looking dashboard on the Horizon you already run, New Dawn is the smallest change. If you need a durable record of what every job did — retained beyond Horizon's window, queryable from your own database — that is Deck. If the gap is that you can see a problem and cannot do anything about it — or that you cannot see it at all, because a held ShouldBeUnique lock or a rate limiter is dropping work silently — that is what Skyline adds. Deck and Skyline are not mutually exclusive; they answer different questions.
Do I have to migrate away from Horizon to use these?
It depends which one. Deck installs alongside Horizon and changes nothing about it. New Dawn replaces the dashboard package. Skyline replaces laravel/horizon in Composer while keeping the Laravel\Horizon\ namespace, so your existing config/horizon.php, gate definitions and Artisan commands keep working and there are no migrations — but it is your Horizon install afterwards, and reverting means switching the Composer requirement back.
Does Laravel Horizon have a paid version?
No. Horizon is free and MIT-licensed, and Laravel does not sell a paid tier of it. The commercial tools in this space are third-party: Skyline, New Dawn and Deck are each built and sold by their own maintainers, not by Laravel.