One of the things that really pisses me off about Bubble is the amount of antipatterns that are required to build basic functionality. One example is showing results in a searchbox. Let’s say you have a Company and Product and you want the searchbox results to show Company - Product. To do this, you have to create a new field, duplicate the data from two fields onto that new field, then use that as the search result. This runs contrary to general good practices and creates an enormous amount of bloat for Bubble at scale (this is just one example).
It would be great as a community if we could point out these unintuitive workarounds which don’t apply to any other programming language and actively make the process of building an app miserable and cumbersome.
There is no reason for us to continue to deal with these in 2026.
Please post your examples here!
Hell, basic support for branching on conditions in a workflow would be great. Frustrating to work linearly on activities with conditions.
Yeah, this is something they’re actively working on.
Your specific example had been pointed out probably as early as 2016-2017 and there are community created solutions, check out plugin marketplace for search box
Search is a foundational part of any web app, shouldn’t have to rely on a plugin for this. It’s not an esoteric financial formula calculator.
Every bubble element is essentially a plugin
What would you prefer bubble prioritize, things like performance, stability, new features like looping, fixing bugs; basically the types of things ONLY bubble could do as the community has no access to bubble codebase, or should they focus on building/expanding their elements; essentially things the community can do and has been doing?
Is the concept of shouldn’t have to rely on plugins for advanced functionality (advance here meaning beyond out of the box bubble abilities) due to not wanting to pay for plugins or a fear of relying on another service provider?
For me personally, I’d prefer bubble focus on only what they can do, and not spend time on stuff the community can do. There are various reasons, one is I’d like bubble to get things done that others can not, and another is, an expansive community of service providers building products on top of bubble for bubble usage is only good for the bubble ecosystem, it is not a bad thing.in fact, sometimes, those service providers own marketing of their own products can draw new Bubble users into the bubble ecosystem. You could think of bubble ecosystem as an economy, where bubble does everything is communism, and bubble focuses on only what it can do while community service providers offer a wide array of products and choices is capitalism.
Sorry but on a public facing, production grade app, plugins can’t be used with current performance issues, even some native elements such as “map” adds 0.4-0.5 secs on web.
- They need to SSR, 2) They need to deprioritize the plugins on load, then we can talk about plugin options.
Yeah, this is another reason why I’m extremely reluctant to use plugins outside of backend stuff.
Personally, I don’t mind using plugins to achieve certain functionalities that I need. I just make sure to choose them carefully to avoid headaches down the road.
I agree that, quite often, we have to take a huge detour to accomplish something that should be simple. The Searchbox is definitely one of those cases, especially because it’s not very flexible and doesn’t allow us to change its data source through the Conditions tab.
Bu what bothers me the most right now, though, is the lack of official ways to perform looping in a simple and safe manner, as well as proper workflow branching with if/else logic.
These are features that have existed natively in virtually every programming language for decades. I even studied Pascal in college (one of the earliest programming languages) and these concepts already existed back then.
To me, it simply doesn’t make sense that Bubble still doesn’t have them. What’s even more frustrating is that they were promised to us two years ago. Remember when Bubble used that as part of the justification for changing the workflow editor navigation from horizontal to vertical (a change that almost nobody liked 
) ?
This makes our workflows huge, complex, and difficult to maintain, because all the if/else steps need to be broken down into custom events or kept in the main workflow using conditions.
I also run into this problem; I apply the same solution. My search searches for clients by name or email so those 2 fields have to be combined in their own which is very inefficient in of itself. But it’s also slow with scale, if it has to search thousands of rows, it’s slow. If someone has a better solution for this, I’m all ears!
In this specifc case, is it not better to use search for “Any field” option?
If it still behaves like it did many years ago, using “Any field” has to match full words, like the “contains keyword(s)” constraint
I agree. One of the biggest ones here is not being able to reference Option Sets for sorting. You have to make and maintain a field that is the Option Set’s display just to enable this feature.
Waiting for Bubble to make this possible.
