Hi All… so I am NOT a technical person. Not a programmer or anything. I’m a volunteer for a NFP neonatal cat rescue in Australia and we needed a way to track cats including basic incoming information, medical information and neonate information… something nice and easy for foster carers to access and upload to.
I found Glide and with the help of the Glide community, I have created an app on the free plan that does the basics. We were planning to buy the base level paid version as we plan to add PDF reports and scheduled automations, but then I found Bubble and I’m wondering if I can produce a similar thing here - as the basic level paid subscription is cheaper than Glide AND Bubble offers a discount for NFP. But having had a quick look, I’m kind of thinking that it will be beyond me to build similar to what we have already in Glide - I couldn’t even work out how to link form fields to a table!
So I guess my question is, given what we want to do, is Bubble the better option and I’m just going to have to try and teach myself it? Or are we better off to stay with Glide given my complete inexperience in all of this? Glide was pretty easy to pickup the basics and get something working fast but I’ve found Bubble quite intimidating (maybe because I’m used to Glide’s ease of use, I don’t know).
Hey! I totally get where you’re coming from. I’ve worked with both Glide and Bubble, and I’d say you’ve already done an amazing job just getting something working in Glide, especially without a tech background.
Glide is great for getting things up and running quickly, and it’s much more beginner-friendly. If what you’ve built already does the job and just needs a few more features like PDF reports and automations, then sticking with Glide might be the easier and more comfortable route. Especially since you’ve already made progress there.
Bubble can definitely give you more control and flexibility, especially long term, but the learning curve is much steeper. It’s more like building a custom app from scratch, and things like linking forms to databases aren’t super intuitive at first. You can learn it over time, and Bubble has a generous NFP discount which helps, but it will take more time and patience than Glide.
So if your main goal is to keep things simple and easy for your foster carers to use and for you to manage, Glide might be the better fit for now. But if later on you hit limitations and want to do more complex stuff, you could always revisit Bubble when you’re ready.
