(Plugin/Template) - (Price) - (Applications using) - (Number of Review/Rating) - Average Rating
Toolbox plugin - Free - 1,484 times - 3 - 5 stars
Air Date/Time plugin - Free - 1,335 times - 3 - 3.5 stars
CSS tools plugin - Free - 492 times - 0 - NA
Team Messaging template - $277 - 13 times - 0 - NA
Home Rentals template - $377 - 14 times - 2 times - 2.5
Does anyone see anything wrong with the above.
Simply put, the rating and reviews system on bubble is currently horrible. How can a plugin be used in about 1,400 applications and have only 2 reviews?
13 people buy a template for $277 and no one posts a review or rate it?
The bubble community is growing rapidly and it is time we all start helping make the community a better one by rating and giving honest reviews of plugins and templates. I buy most of my stuff from Amazon because i think the Amazon rating and review system is one of the best in the world. If iām going to buy something and 5,000 verified buyers says it is a great product, it must be great (and vice versa).
Currently i have just 5 free plugins listed on the plugin store (have several private and custom ones) which as at the time of making this post have been used in 2,970 applications, yet the total number of reviews/ratings for all of them is less than 10.
I anticipate the bubble community to grow about 3 times next year by this time. Which means the number of plugins and templates are going to start growing tremendously. It is therefore important we all start rating and reviewing the stuff we used so that it will help weed out the bad from the good. Iāve seen really amazing plugins and templates on bubble and iāve started seeing horrible ones too. With the growing number of plugins and templates weāre going to start seeing duplicate designs and functionalities and it is only a very comprehensive review and rating system that will help guide new users which ones to try or spend their monies on.
Once we have a huge number of ratings and reviews then we can ask bubble to impleting sorting and filtering based on ratings on the template and plugin store.
CALL TO ACTION
Go if youāve used any template whether free or paid kindly go and rate/review it.
If you used any plugin, free or paid, kindly go and rate/reivew. For plugins in your bubble editor go to the plugins tab click on the plugin and you can rate it and give a review as well.
I couldnāt agree moreā¦when skilled people have taken the time to create (without question the free plug-ins) the minimum we can do as consumersā¦ Is to rate and spend a few moments to provide some feedback. How can we hope or expect the developers to continually keep abreast of changes if we donāt ourselves put some energy back inā¦@Jarrad@mishav@seanhoots all active in the forum continually providing feedback and support when necessary for these. Although Iāve paid for support to Jarrad and Mishaā¦ āBoth exceptionalā I myself have not provided any reviews or ratings soā¦ I will eat my own dog foodā¦ Heed my own advice and get that done
Good initiative. However, Iām not sure if developers would proactively continue to do this in the long run without recurring reminders.
This maybe a more effective way to drive people to rate plugins:
Bubble can add a popup question asking you to rate the previously installed plugin right before you install a new plugin, just like uber does with its rides.
Actually I never look at the reviews for a couple reasons:
I trust the plugins that are available in the āstoreā. (Its not a store when you canāt actually buy a plugin). Maybe not rightfully so.
Because it doesnāt feel like a store, the reviews seem less important (also because most are free)
I look at the number of apps using a plugin: that tells me a lot more than the couple of reviews
Most plugins are pushed and cover support through the forum. The popular plugins are easily recognisable that way and get lots of love from the community.
When the plugin section actually feels like a store, I think those reviews will become more important. But most people see the plugins in the forum and get trust from there.
So maybe its an option to have some sort of rating system on the āofficialā plugin thread? Although I donāt really see the need.
My quick thoughts on plugins, especially now that Iām using Bubble for a key work project:
I inherently trust Bubble-authored plugins. As a rule, I donāt trust non-Bubble-authored plugins.
Iāve never considered the quantitative reviews of Bubble plugins, because the āstoreā itself seems somewhat shoddy still. Agree with @vincent56 that the number of apps using a plugin carries more weight at this stage.
Even for plugins with hundreds or thousands of apps using it, I still donāt necessarily trust them if they arenāt authored by Bubble. I donāt know if seeing that it had a 4.1/5.0 rating or whatever would change that. I always check the forums to read as much as I can about a given plugin and how its author interacts with users on the forums. Itās a very high bar to clear for me to trust my appās functionality/stability/security with an external developer, especially now in a āreal workā context.
Iāve built two main apps on Bubble over 2+ years ā¦ Iāve installed and uninstalled a variety of plugins just to see if/how theyāve worked, but currently still have only Bubble-installed plugins active. The closest I got to really using an externally-built plugin was amcharts for about a month, but even then it was only out of desperation (the Bubble-built chart plugin has almost zero features) and I soon scrapped it in favor of a home-grown Google Charts solution once I had time to invest in learning it.
I guess what Iām really saying is: I donāt think reviews are going to help Bubble plugin authors or Bubble developers that much, at least not without other changes. I do think that redesigning the plugin āshopping experienceā itself would be a good move for Bubble, modeling itself after how other popular platforms work (Numeric Reviews, Comments, Q&A, Screenshots, Changelog), be it the App/Play stores, CMS/e-commerce platforms, or whatever ā in particular if itās going to continue focusing on scalability/stability and other platform-level stuff (e.g., responsiveness) as opposed to features/functions.
As is, I think that Bubble plugin authors would best serve themselves and the user community by establishing a more formal āpresenceā outside of Bubble, something akin to what @levon is doing with zeroqode. That would give me much more confidence at this point than a bunch of extra reviews in the current store.
I totally agree. I have the Google Maps API plugin and I think itās the 2nd highest used plugins thatās not made by bubble. All I get is bad reviews (all of which are from people that donāt know how to follow the documentation link). I assume that the other 1800 users are happy or benefit from it. And would love to get some positive feedbackā¦
Quick question - where do I read the Reviews of the plugins? I canāt find where people have written their review, I can only see the star rating.
Had a bad experience with a Bubble plugin that is either poorly coded or out of date and want to make sure that one of their other ones does not have issues of a similar severity.
