Bubble vs full stack

Questions
1

In light of the recent changes at bubble, I am considering venturing down the path of learning traditional full stack development. What would you say are the areas that Bubble really cuts the most development time? And conversely, what tasks or areas seem to take more time the no-code way?

From my bubbling experience I would imagine certain common features like uploading pictures, signing up/logging in users, maybe even page layout and design can be done a blistering speed compared to starting from scratch with code. And it is nice having bubble handle the database interactions, and privacy rules and autobinding etc.

But then I’ve found, once I get into hyper-specific tweaks or nuanced interactions, some things aren’t possible without all kinds of research, and trial and error.

One example being, I struggled for several months (part time nights and occasional week ends) trying to get values in a series of interdependent nested repeating groups (4 deep) to recalculate when reorganized using drag and drop using bubble methods and list shifter and nearly hemorrhaged my brain. I would get so close, and it would almost work, and then it kind of wouldn’t sometimes. It was maddening. Then I decided to pause on bubble and spent 2 weeks learning JS and was able to successfully do it neatly, systematically and joyfully in JS in a couple of hours. It now works quickly and consistently. Of course I went on from there to do all kinds handy little tweaks all over the app with JS that I just couldn’t get to work right doing it other ways.

Does the time saving of the vanilla and generic features greatly outweigh the time it takes to fuss around to get a complex web app to behave properly? What would you full stack developers say are the things that make bubble appealing to you and maybe not so much?

2

From my perspective, outside of speed of development, the single biggest benefit of bubble (and no code generally) is that they more or less handle EVERYTHING else for you. From infrastructure to releases and ultimately your dev ops.

I have worked for a traditional saas with thousands of business customers, let me tell you - getting coders is expensive, they often aren’t full stack so you need front and back end etc. AND you have got to have people that understand your infrastructure, your db hosting, things like kubernetes, docker, load balancing, VM’s, nodes, elastic search indexing etc - stuff you don’t think about as a bubbler/no coder and long May that continue.

If you want someone to help you deal with your ddos attack that happens on a Monday morning you have to pay for them unless you can do it yourself. For us bubblers, bubble are there to support us.

This infrastructure support from bubble is worth a fortune to us, if you get customers the bubble team is there to help - it’s why we must pay a premium for more than the editor and workflow runs.

Frankly I have no wish to ever export code, it’s not worth it. If you need code to sell your company, employ coders when you can afford to do it/the time comes.

No code and I guess a hybrid of ai written code will be the future - perhaps platform as a service that runs it all for you will be the next big thing.

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3

It is a lot easier to host, run and maintain traditional code now than a few years back.

For the kind of apps you would write in Bubble you could do with some effort, and probably not more effort than you have to put in to be a good Bubbler.

Using VMs, set up load balancing, configuring Docker, nodes ++ to build web apps is not the road I recommend as it’s more like reinventing the wheel. AWS, Microsoft or whichever cloud provider you choose can do this automatically for you.

You can host your web app on a service like Heroku or my favourite Azure App Service which basically handles everything for you, including authentication for Google, Microsoft, Apple ++.
These Cloud Providers also has protection for Ddos attacks, budget alerts and budget limits and it is easy to set up.

I really do enjoy Bubble.io but I also like code for its supreme performance, scalability and flexibility.

The best about Bubble is that it is easy to set up prototypes for customers. The ackward parts of Bubble.io is their privacy rules (which is a ton more complicated to set up than with traditional code), performance in loops, handling large files and securing files.

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4

I don’t disagree with you but it’s still not anywhere near as straightforward as building and utilising a no code infrastructure and is still a skill set in itself with its own learning curve.

If you were to build a saas in traditional code as a single person you will almost certainly need to hire people. No code gives you a huge financial and speed to delivery advantage all without the need to get up to speed on what you’ve mentioned above.

Of course if you can code and have knowledge of everything mentioned then go for it but if you don’t and want to get up to speed you’ll take a lot longer to start bringing in the $$$ - maybe even run out it before you get going.

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5

It is relative and most certain not a black/white answer. Bubble.io might seem faster when starting, but it can slow down your progress when you meet certain challenges in Bubble.io. Like delete a lot of “things” and requiring a callback from that deletion.

I built a fullstack web app in two months with Azure App Service and pushed it to the market. This brought in $10 000/month. I am writing this, since you were mentioning “$$$”.

I did prototype this in Bubble first in about two weeks. And that is something I recommend to do. Then you get most of the major change requests out of the way with visual programming. There are a lot of these changes in startups. After prototyping, you know exactly what you need to build with code.

Just to mention, I took a few programming courses on Udemy and I am not a professional coder, don’t code daily and am not a super genius. Anyone can do this.

But for the sake of the discussion. I think Bubble is more fun to work with than traditional code.

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6

Here’s your stack

HTML
CSS
Javascript
DB
Infra

HTML/CSS are relatively quick to learn, but quite slow to build a pixel-perfect UX compared to low-code. It takes about 2-3x longer for someone proficient to build 50-100 element page conventional bootstrap vs Bubble. That said, conventional is more robust. A lot of Bubble UX components are shrouded in javascript to handle various scenarios of usage, which can in rare conditions have cross-browser/OS discrepancies that would be irrelevant compared to a vanilla build in conventional.

Javascript - the largest area of difference. Learning javascript and employing javascript are significantly longer in full-conventional vs Bubble. That said, a lot of conventional frameworks speed a lot of this up for you, you simply will be dependent on the conventional frameworks and their functional interpretations of whatever functions you’re trying to setup.

DB - past the necessary learning curve of DB modeling and SQL, the actual development time-difference between Bubble and conventional is almost negligible, and coding in a conventional DB (such as writing procedures and functions) unlocks a world of additional possibilities compared to Bubble. Batch processing, bulk row work, advanced joins, etc all executing 5-10x faster vs Bubble. This is Bubble’s weakest area compared to conventional.

Infra - Bubble handles this all for you, as mentioned, but that also comes with its drawbacks. Your site can go down simply because someone is targeting Bubble as a whole with a DDoS. On the contrary, in conventional, if your site goes down, the only person you can rely on is in the mirror. Bubble spins up underlying infra for a new site in about 2 mins. In conventional, for someone proficient, it takes about a work day from scratch (provisioning, hardening, logging setup, scheduling, monitoring, SSL, etc)

All in all, it fully depends on a conventional stack of choice, but I’ve found a conventional site takes about 3x longer in total for someone senior/proficient to develop compared to creating the same thing fully in Bubble.

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7

Yes agreed it’s not binary, there are certainly different needs for different problems. I think ultimately you are probably an exception (certainly if you’ve never coded or been around any tech before) And i commend you for learning to code from scratch, and learning the infrastructure side of things, launching and then scaling it to a pretty remarkable amount of $.

That being said, I think for non techies ( and those that find a product like bubble) to launch a product fit for purpose/market there is so much more to think about than they know without a cto partner or paying for developers/contractors (which in itself can be hit and miss in a world full of mediocre developers).

The gap between the issues in no code as you have correctly outlined and what you can more easily achieve if you know how to code is rapidly shrinking all the time.

I think or rather expect AI to actually bring the two together pretty soon. Where even having to learn products like bubble let alone code and infrastructure will be less important than ever. I’m Not against coders and have worked with and employed many great ones and i would fully encourage anyone to learn to code - I think ultimately it compliments no code and makes you a better all rounder anyway.

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8

I believe no one should ever set up an architecture like this today. Probably should fire your infra engineer… In a modern cloud environment your site never go down, and if it does, a new instance is spun up in the matter of seconds.

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9

Building a HA node with hot-switching and the version control pipeline to match, is only pseudo-trivial. It still takes infra time to setup correctly. And even docker node spun up on some provider (DigitalOcean, Heroku, etc) takes a few hours to get humming right.

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11

No. My advise to you is to avoid setting up infra. You set up PaaS, apart in rare cases, in which Bubble neither would be an option.

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12

Yes. I am looking forward to AI can assist us.

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13

Excellent feedback! Thanks!

This is important for me to remember. I have relatives in this business and they agree with your sentiments.

Excellent point. I haven’t looked into these types of services, but absolutely makes sense if the price is scalable (in both directions). When I flirt with idea going “full stack”, would almost certainly land somewhere here for back end.

I was just looking at a 3 course bundle for HTML, CSS, JS. Thinking I’ll move forward there either way. Certainly couldn’t hurt even if I stay with bubble. The rest of your post is gold.

I can’t tell you all how helpful this feedback has been. Thanks!

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14

I’d be very interested to hear more of your story. I imagine the 2 months you spent building this web app was full time? Did you take the Udemy course in order to build this site? or just taking them for personal interest and then opportunity struck? Did you build this for yourself or someone else? if someone else, and you aren’t a professional coder, why were you approached for this? Please tell me more and give as much detail as you feel comfortable sharing.

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15

100% agreed. The more knowledge you have of core web technologies, the better you will do on Bubble.io.

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16

I started on bubble but moved on to Swift because I really want to build iPhone apps but let me tell you: bubble is amazing and learning code is complicated and hard.

Don’t get me wrong. I love code now. But the transition to coding is painful and the thing is: you’ll never know everything you need to know to do everything you want to do with code. Learning code is an endless road. Bubble is not.

There’s a huge difference between doing a bit of js here and there and deploying an entire web app and the gulf is astronomical.

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17

It is complicated but what do you think about the long term?

Also, Bubble is great but lacks loads of things you could do with code.

My guess is that an MVP and something more than an MVP, bubble is the way to go but at the end to keep the business sustainable in the long term you’ll have to learn to code.

What technologies are you into if you don’t mind?

Thanks!

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