Hi,
I have very similar comments to those from Vincent so I won’t repeat.
Some additional observations based on my personal experience:
Presentation Layer:
Bubble is waaaay better than Knack on everything UI-related. I don’t need to know how to spell CSS to create great-looking interfaces using Bubble. Not so with Knack. Note that if you can stay within the constraints of Knack’s screens, although they are not going to be pretty, you will be able to cook them way faster than in Bubble. I like from Knack the ability to arrange the pages in my editor in the order I want to see them, not alphabetically. I haven’t checked Knack recently but neither it nor Bubble has folders where you can put groups of related pages together.
Logic Layer
I found that with Knack, I needed to know quite a bit of Javascript to get anything to work. Maybe I had bad luck, but a lot of core functionality that I needed to do could not be done from within the tool. Simple example: I needed a process to retrieve several records from one table, massage them, and write them into another. The relationship between the records read and written was not 1 to 1. To do that in Knack requires creating your own JavaScript, passing JSON arguments and above all, understanding the intricacies of ajax and Node.js. I was never a professional programmer and the async nature of all these calls was a bit too much for me. Couple to that the fact that the code really runs in the user’s browser, so your Database can end up in weird states if the user refreshes the page before your JS completed.
Bubble, on the other hand, has the workflow concept, and although it has its quirks, it’s much easier to create and understand than JS and most of what you do runs as server-side code. The plugins and other functionality that the Bubble guys have made available made Bubble a clear winner here.
Database Layer
I think Knack outguns Bubble in the following spaces:
- Knack has identity fields (a number that is automatically incremented when you add a record). Knack’s ID fields are not as flexible as Ragic’s, where you can create something like ORDER-123456 instead of just 123456. In Bubble, you have to code the functionality as a separate step in your workflow.
- Knack has List fields. These are a type of field, usually a text, that can take only a set of values you define. This is extremely useful for Status fields (e.g. Not Started, Ongoing, Completed). You can define the sort order and Knack will present you with the existing values when are “coding” a condition.
- Knack lets you sort and filter by connected fields (foreign keys)
- Knack lets you order the fields anyway you want in the editor, so you can keep related fields together, instead of Bubble’s default alphabetical presentation.
- Knack uses the user name as the sorting key for the field when presenting field names to the developer, while Bubble still uses the internal name that was given to the field when it was created for the first time. I found that a minor annoyance but I can live with it.
- Knack gives developers a much more intuitive interface to edit fields in the database (as a spreadsheet), to filter records and to edit them in bulk.
- Knack has embedded audit controls that let you visually inspect which field of the database was changed when.
- Knack has many other field types (formulas, sum, etc.) that I think are in Bubble’s roadmap. Some of them are useful to have a quick count of children records but I found them restrictive at times, in particular the formula fields, but they were better than nothing.
Bubble is better here:
9) Bubble has a few more data types like date ranges and date intervals that did not exist in Knack and the ability to have fields that are lists of things. This is relatively powerful and sometimes saves you from creating intermediate tables.
10) Bubble has a better model to go back to previous versions of your data.
Hope this helps,
Alex
