@J805 is bubble tutor he makes money from new users on the platform, I don’t think you will get an unbiased opinion.
I’m not scared anymore, leaving bubble was best decision, no more anxiety.
The app didn’t time out at 5 users, I want to make that clear but generally it was slow. Building products is competitive, speed is essential when going against tradition codebase apps.
I’m not the best person to ask since I haven’t needed to upgrade any of my apps past the personal plan. 
Also, as mentioned above, I might be biased considering my income is completely from Bubble at the moment.
I can tell you that I have seen improvements over the years I have been with Bubble.
For example, I have an app that a few years ago had some very heavy workflows which would put me over the personal plan. I didn’t want to upgrade so I capped my users at 1,341 users. My site is free to them so I couldn’t afford to spend a lot every month on hosting it. If I were to charge them $25/year I think I could comfortably scale without an issue. I don’t want to charge them though, I want to keep providing this to them for free. As a note, my users don’t use the app everyday. Maybe about 10 use it per day. It’s a scheduling app. So they do heavy workflows about once a month per user. So not the best example either.
Anyways, last year there were times when it would reach capacity on some heavy workflows. I just checked recently and I haven’t hit the capacity in a long time. I check the logs now and I don’t see it hitting capacity at all anymore.
This means Bubble has done something on their end. I think this is when they pushed this update:
Changes we made this month
On the performance front, we had another big release, this time focused on our “Make change to a list of things…” and “Copy a list of things…” actions. It involves better backend logic for batch processing, and accomplishes three things: 1) decreasing the amount of capacity these actions use, 2) decreasing the total time they take to run on the server, causing workflows to complete faster, and 3) paving the way for future performance improvements that will improve other data modification actions as well. In terms of numbers, on a professional-plan benchmark app we use, copying 99 things went from 26.5 seconds to 6.0 seconds, and even more dramatically, now only uses 5% of the capacity it used to use. We’re excited by the progress and look forward to more improvements in the future.
Link: Monthly Community Update - August 2020
I think Bubble has potential. But again, I feel I’m biased and not the best person to ask.
Hi, there has been a ton of stuff written on this question, with insights from Bubble users who built larger apps.
This was a helpful one: A fair and honest chat about Performance
If you search around on “performance” you’ll find a bunch of other ones.
I’d also suggest reading the monthly community updates from Josh, which have discussed some of the performance/reliability projects.
Wow, they haven’t resolved the speed issue since 2018. This is bad.
I just wonder what’s stopping them from resolving this? Looks like bubble will never be able to overcome this. It’s probably built just as a MVP builder platform.
The problem with the thread is that Bubble speed improvment over this time is not part of it!
Bubble add a lot of stuff around speed and continue to work on it. But I can tell you that an app that was taking 5 second to load last year may take 1 or 1.5 actually.
And more, a lot of “speed issue” are not on Bubble side but on builder side 
But there’s speed improvment on some action that can be improved for sure!
I built a trading website for an mmo, so essentially an auction house. On the professional plan, with only 10 concurrent users, and with pagination on the repeating groups, the site would completely die. So yes, performance is a huge issue with Bubble, and the pricing between tiers is nuts. What even is a unit?
I run a forum on the side, with 600k registered members and always 1,000 to 2,000 online at any time, and the server only costs me £500 a month, no crashes, no lag, no performance issues.
It’s nice that Bubble are building a new fancy editor, but if they can’t achieve reasonable performance - I’d expect the personal plan to be able to handle 20 concurrent users - then Wappler will take the market fair and square. It’s an awesome tool with a slightly higher learning curve and a monthly recurring fee, but end of the day, you keep your project and you can host it wherever you want.
You’ve made a mistake here unless you can jump onto one of the dedicated servers, but even then, I have seen people complain about those…
All the best.
I host it on Vultr, the website server and the database server costs me a combined £500ish each month. It’s only an Xenforo installation, so likely nothing too intensive. It’s just a comparison than you can spend £500 for 2,000 users elsewhere, or get a professional plan, which is what £150ish now? And not even handle 10 users lol.
I’d recommend Wappler honestly and ignore the agencies that claim they can optimise your app for $$$.
I’m not a Bubble tutor, nor am beholden to Bubble in any way. I have looked at a number of no-code tools, and here’s the simple truth: there is no platform that lets you easily build a front-end, back-end, DB, use no code, cost less than $100 a month, and that is lightning fast for 10,000 users, regardless of the complexity of your app. Each platform has one or more of these features, and there is none that has all these.
There are two distinct axes: 1) ease of making a website, and 2) scalability and performance. They are completely unrelated.
For axis (1), perform a simple exercise: look at the tutorials, forums, and YouTube videos for each platform (Wappler, Bubble, AppGyver, WebFlow, Carrd, whatever you want). As a very simple example, look at Bubble’s how-to for creating an Instagram or Facebook clone. Then look at Wappler’s tutorial for making a social media website. And the other platforms. Depending on your skill set, experience, and mental make up, you will know what’s right for you for axis (1)
For axes (2), go to each platform’s forum and see what people complain about. Also try to find a few sites made on each and evaluate.
If you are amateur, and this is one of your first few websites, the reality is that you will have a few users on day one, a few more users the next week and so on. Everyone dreams of being the next Instagram, but it is unlikely.
Use a platform that lets you evaluate different features, lets you build and rebuild fast, debug fast, add user-requested features quickly, and so on.
I think all of these discussions are to some extent like people arguing about Toyota vs Mercedes vs Ferrari.
I have no tech background so I chose bubble. If it cant handle 10 users then there seems to be no point in putting 6 months in learning it and building something on your own.
A guy in the above post claims to be paying bubble $2500/month to manage his site of 300k traffic and yet says it is dead slow itseems.
This is bad. Really feels like a bad decision.
Bubble is great for building, but we’re discussing the performance here. If you have a killer idea, Bubble is not the most scalable software, but Bubble wins in regards to ease of use. Wappler and Webflow in my opinion are more difficult to master.
You need to seriously look at wappler again.
Ya, I hadn’t done any research.
Even if I did, I would have chosen bubble bcuz of no tech background.
Wappler is great, you just need to overcome the initial hurdles but the community is insanely helpful. You get a 7 day free trial with the software, so surely that’s worth a go right?
I think because the big fixes take resources. Business was bootstrapped until a year ago (i.e. small staff), then they raised $6 million in mid-2019 and have been hiring more staff including engineers. I’ve seen posts this year with users reporting some speed improvements. If you want to see what they’ve fixed and are working on, read Josh’s monthly updates.
If you’ve built a prototype, test it out and see what capacity it uses. My prototype seems to use about 2% capacity per active user on a base professional plan (3 units) – so about 50 active users concurrently. Only a small % of users would be on at the same time, so that’s a sizeable user base that could be supported. App is a search and display app for industry information.
Note some of the posts by @keith who has untangled some users’ apps who had structured things that were slowing them down.
I’ve been, but their 7-day trial is a big turn-off. I would rather use the completely free AppGyver instead.
I haven’t used Wappler, and it’s probably a great tool – but they themselves say they are aimed at a different user base. Their website says: “we’re focused on professionals and web developers”.
I looked at a lot of tools, and ran into other Wappler-esque tools that basically give you a lot of building resources and CMS functionality, then you host, customize and fill in code here and there.
Bubble to me is different – enables non-technical founders to build a lot of functionality and iterate fast to adapt to user needs.
That’s what I hopped in for.
Love it’s features and the ease to build stuff.
But, if it takes 10 to 15 sec to load everytime or sometimes not even load then it all becomes pointless.
It becomes even scary when you see that this issue has continued from 2018. Gives you a feeling that they will never focus on performance.
I’m not sure where that’s coming from and I don’t think that’s typical. You could read through all the showcase apps & app of the day apps and check them out for speed.
Thanks for the tip about Wrapper!
