Bubble has been facing a lot of criticism lately, especially for the way it launches new features without proper refinement and fails to fix old issues. This frustrates experienced users who expect a more mature platform. The feeling that Bubble’s team doesn’t listen to the community has been a recurring theme in the forum.
On the other hand, WeWeb has been gaining a lot of attention with its more agile and innovative approach. With WeWeb 3.0 and its AI integration, it delivers the features that users always wanted in Bubble but never materialized or arrived incomplete. They are clearly moving faster in evolving their platform and could become the leading no-code tool if they maintain this pace.
The future of AI + no-code is still being built, but WeWeb seems to be one step ahead in this race. If Bubble keeps ignoring community requests and releasing half-baked features, transitioning to other platforms will only be a matter of time.
Yeah it seriously sucks to be in that mindset, but it gets to the point where you hold on hope year after year for x feature to come out or this bug to be finally fixed and it never seems comes to fruition. There were times of the past few years where there was some momentum from the early days of new releases and functionality, but I believe over the years the technical debt and stability took a hit and really limited development progress.
For instance, the big bubble editor redesign from 2019 that Matt Legrand cooked up, never came to life and instead its only recently been drip fed into the editor UI, we’ve still not got to the “Data” tab yet and the awfully limited widths for fields and properties that makes life harder than it needs to be.
Other things like the editor Logs are still buggy and cumbersome to use, internal plugins have been forgotten about, performance and stability improved last year but now things have gone backwards and dipped, things get announced (workflow statement branches) or remain in permanent beta (table element).
I hate to rant about this, I seriously think bubble is a powerhouse product, it’s honestly changed my life over the years and without it I would have missed out on a lot of opportunities, it’s truly revolutionary at its time, but it feels like that term is slipping out of its grasp of its capabilities unfortunately.
With the evolving landscape of technical products around us, in the no-code, low code, AI builder space, I’m worried bubble is going to be left behind and I really hope that does not end up the case…
Hmm you realize many of the companies on bubble are bootstrapped or low run rate startups? That have spent countless hours building their dream here.
When over the last 2 years both the editor & site stability has dropped drastically but slowly it’s totally valid they feel that way.
Personally I’ve had countless stressful days where we are spending 30k+ per month on advertising for our site over the last couple years, profiting of course, but we get the calls, texts, and emails where we get told it’s down, images won’t load, etc etc.
When we are spending that level of advertising budget and advertising only running in a 12 hr period of a day we are burning $ for nothing that equates to about $90/hr when there are issues + reputation hits.
When these issues are daily/weekly and we are promised that they will be fixed and there is a plan in place to do so we wait, but then it’s got worse and worse and they are prioritizing other things of course the thought of “every time I use bubble I hate it”
Some of us have clients where we get the calls and irritation from them we have to manage for something 100% out of our control because bubble isn’t providing the 1 thing that is truly required when you have platform lock like this, stable and reliable hosting & editing.
At risk of sounding tone deaf, wouldn’t Bubble quite reasonably argue that if you’re spending $30k/mo on advertising alone, you can afford a dedicated instance? Enterprise dedicated is designed for mission critical apps like yours clearly is.
That’s not to say that Bubble shouldn’t solve reliability for non-dedicated apps - of course they should, or they’ll quickly go out of business. But for apps where it really is that high stakes, people should probably pay accordingly.
$30k on advertising doesn’t = $30k that can just be thrown around. Most of it is top of funnel bait offering advertising in a “small” market consisting of <8k businesses in the area that are qualified for our product we currently target (state wide/country wide expansion planned).
Of that $30k each month we range from 0.7 - 1.4 return on ad spend front end and most of the profit is made on the back end for multi month contracts but it takes nurturing, giving them a good experience, a stable platform, etc to land the backend b2b contracts where the money really comes from.
So the ad spend TOF basically just pays for itself. Locking into paying $14k per quarter is a big deal for any size company let alone startups. That almost $5k per month could go to such better places considering bubble offers non dedicated options that are realistically supposed to be stable because it’s the core of their product.
We were dedicated for quite some time, however, with the WU switch, promise of stability, original rate limit removals, etc the $14k/quarter dedicated cost didn’t make sense. When we switched off dedicated our site went down for over a week and support kept putting it on us until Josh stepped in and fixed bubbles issue in 15 minutes.
Moving back to dedicated is not only a risk considering the last experience with it so the company doesn’t want to switch and now it’s peak time of the year.
Not to mention there’s no world where a product forcing you to use its hosting then having this many issues is acceptable in any manor.
Definitely misses most of what should be understood.
Complaints are valid, nobody should attempt to downplay them as “there’s a 15-30x more expensive option that may solve things for app, but nothing about editor”
Just because companies can allocate resources for a particular expense that drives revenue doesn’t mean they are frivolous spenders and can just let $40,000 a year leave their accounts
It sounds like the argument that we shouldn’t complain because “without bubble, we wouldn’t have an app or business as a developer”, which misses the idea that people/businesses have choices of where and how to spend their resources to drive their goals, and if not Bubble, another provider would possibly provide what they need to achieve their goals.
Bubble has a lot more headwinds than ever before due to direct competition, and now has strong side winds due to competition from new technology that the Bubble ship is in some pretty rough seas right now, while there’s a leak in the hull of the ship that is taking on more water each day.
It’s difficult in my opinion to not see this as a concerning issue for anybody who has invested in Bubble as much as people have by creating businesses on bubble that have taken many years to do, be that a development agency or a single app.
This is really a tone deaf answer and completely unrealistic for how Software companies have worked forever. Bubble won’t change that for the majority of people. Software is high margin, Bubble’s approach to that is trying to change that system. It won’t work. It isn’t working.
Once a software product has found product market fit, it doesn’t actually change that much. The ongoing costs of development go down dramatically and it becomes a game of pouring fuel onto the fire of marketing to acquire users. It is a massively unrealistic thing to expect businesses to spend a high % of their expected income to Bubble when they can build a software product elsewhere for far cheaper.
and i know the argument, AI will only get you 80% of the way there… that’s falsely untrue for those who are not complete beginners and understand backend, auth security etc. The type of users who are more likely to actually have a successful app. Bubble’s whole pricing system is broken but enough people have already said that.
Bubble simply cannot rewrite the way that investors / entrepreneurs / markets think about software businesses and with the new tech being more accessible than ever, I’m surprised there aren’t already more people taking advantage of such opportunities to migrate Bubble apps.
I run an agency, so I see Bubble from multiple client perspectives. We and Bubble win together, but business is business, so we’ll use the best tool for the job. Jumping ship now would be a poor decision for most of our projects.
The core sentiment in this thread (that is pretty provocatively titled) seems to be frustration with Bubble’s current state, particularly the editor experience and stability. And I get that - many of you are genuinely hitting roadblocks. Naturally, given the title of this thread, only certain voices would gather here.
But you’re clearly all still here. If the alternatives were truly superior for what we are building, wouldn’t you have migrated already? The constant “I hate Bubble” refrain, while cathartic perhaps, is probably overshadowing the reasons we chose Bubble in the first place and continue to use it.
The platform must improve (and it will). Core stability and editor performance aren’t ‘nice-to-haves,’ they are fundamental. But asking ourselves, “why am I on Bubble despite the current issues?” isn’t intended to excuse problems. It’s just about identifying the value prop that Bubble needs to preserve and enhance while they address the bugs and performance issues that are causing so much friction.
No platform is perfect - if you all jump ship to traditional development, there are going to be things that consistently pester you there. There will always be something to improve (some more important than others) but you might benefit from reflecting on why you chose this path in the first place. And if you reflect and Bubble doesn’t make sense for you, then, well, choose the best option for you, because Bubble isn’t the right option. for everyone.
Agree, now how do we get Bubble to solve these issues? I am not going to jump ship but I am refusing to accept Bubble’s refusal to take the issues, that are mentioned over and over again, seriously.
The only thing that Bubble seems to listen to is a big group of users being very vocal about their frustrations (f.i. last years and current issues with platform stability, the community response and the post Josh made about it).
I think you are also part of the problem @fede.bubble . @emmanuel@josh this type of community manager that his sole job is to say that the issues are going to be passed to the “engineering team” without really digging and interviewing users to find out what the real problems and solutions are it’s just pointless. At this point every serious bubble dev is looking for alternative solutions put there, and not because we really want, simply because bubble is turning too risky and not sustainable.
It’s the sunk-cost fallacy. Too many people are invested in building in bubble, they can be discontent about the platform and think it’s “bad” but they’ve spent too much time learning it and dedicated resources into their bubble apps to switch now.
What I am worried about is none of these problems people have brought up will be evident to the “Day 2” user base which will arrive with the full AI rollout of building apps until they’re deeply integrated into using bubble, in which case I’d hope that they get resolved before then.
I’m sorry to hear that — as you can imagine, the Bubble team receives a lot of feedback coming from every channel like support and social media every day and that includes feedback I share from the forum (and direct messages as well). I like to acknowledge every feedback thread to make sure users know it didn’t just get lost in the forum.
In terms of interviews and deeper research, we have a user research team that conducts research studies all the time: pretty much there’s always at least one ongoing any given week.
My DMs are always open if you want to share anything in particular!
This is harsh, I absolutely have my gripes with bubble believe me, but if anything I would say @fede.bubble is a positive influence from what I’ve seen. After a point, they’re just trying to do their job, and one look at this hostile forum (yours truly included ) is enough to know it must be a rough gig at times.
In general I think the personal attacks should probably stay off the table. Let’s keep it to levelling criticism at the entity, rather than throwing out individual criticisms of the staff members when we have zero real context of their internal role or what they actually do with our feedback.
this type of community manager that his sole job is to say that the issues are going to be passed to the “engineering team” without really digging and interviewing users to find out what the real problems and solutions are it’s just pointless.
Bet the team wishes the case… I know Fede pesters them all the time about things we care about.
) is enough to know it must be a rough gig at times.