Blade (Templating)

Blade is the templating engine built into Laravel. It compiles to plain PHP, and it uses a directive syntax — @if, @foreach, @include, @extends, @section — that maps closely to PHP control structures but keeps templates readable. Since Statamic is a Laravel application, you can use Blade instead of (or alongside) Antlers for your templates.

The main reason to choose Blade over Antlers is access to the full PHP ecosystem within your templates. You can call any PHP function, use Laravel helpers, access Statamic’s PHP API directly, and take advantage of IDE support that understands Blade syntax. For developers coming from a PHP background, Blade tends to feel more natural because there’s no new language to learn.

Antlers, by contrast, is purpose-built for Statamic’s content layer. It handles things like outputting Statamic field values, looping through entries, and calling Statamic’s tags with less syntax overhead. For a content editor maintaining templates, Antlers is often easier to read. For a developer building complex functionality, Blade might be preferable.

In practice, many Statamic projects use both. The main layout and content-focused templates might use Antlers for clarity, while more programmatic components — custom form handling, complex conditionals, third-party integrations — get written in Blade. Statamic supports .antlers.html, .antlers.php, and .blade.php file extensions for templates, and you can use any of them in the same project.

For teams migrating from WordPress with PHP-heavy themes, Blade is often the more comfortable landing spot. The mental model of PHP-in-templates is familiar, and the transition from WordPress template tags to Blade/Statamic patterns is more direct than learning Antlers from scratch. That said, both are reasonable choices, and neither locks you into anything you can’t change later.