I’ve been noticing for quite some time quite a dramatic slowdown in bugfixes and feature updates to plugins, at least to the plugins I use for my app. Due to some critical plugins I needed that seem to no longer be actively maintained (almost every plugin I use now) - I had to take matters into my own hands and build the plugins I needed myself, which effectively defeats the purpose of using a “no-code” platform!
I am curious what others are seeing from the bubble plugin ecosystem? Are the plugins you use being actively maintained, or have things universally reached a level of “maturity” they no longer “need” updates (seems unlikely)?
Both. When you choose a plugin it is also a good thing to check the plugin author page : is he.she added other plugins? Is he.she has been active recently on the forum?
Generally speaking, bubble built plugins do not get updated, this is why such critical elements like multiselect and multidropdown and RTE just do not have the expected features or usability. Most of the times, I would like to believe I could trust a Bubble built plugin more than a free alternative from another source, but sadly, bubble is not putting in the effort for bug fixes to the platform overall, so their plugins are likely falling to the wayside even more so.
There are some solid free plugins, that likely will never need an update, and some that have great, dedicated teams/individuals behind them. It has always been good practice to research the plugin itself and the developer behind it when making a decision on whether to use it or not.
I don’t use many paid or free plugins from developers that do not have a solid, long standing reputation in Bubble, and so far, that approach as served me correct most of the time. I’ve been victim to plugins being removed by the developer as they decide to leave the platform entirely, but I don’t use that as a guiding light and instead chalk that up to the developer just making an emotionally charged decision.
Generally, my main criteria has been about functionality - as it always seems that my use cases are somewhat pushing the limits of the platform (e.g. the need for loops, conditional logic, client-side behaviours, external data sources). In most these cases, there are usually very few options - but I do try to stick with the “larger” players. With that said, even those large plugins I am aware of bugs and yet they have not seen any updates in many months, whereas in the past they had been getting regular updates.
Absolutely. It’s absolutely infuriating trying to get the multidrop elements appearing the way I want… but my absolute biggest gripe is the lack of “must not be empty” functionality - which means I need to add in a ton of extra logic and conditionals just to handle empty values. Not to mention the absolutely useless functionality of the inbuilt google maps element.
This is how I see plugins such as ListShifter & Floppy - but even then, Keith is no longer active on the platform since the WU drama (among other reasons) - so I’m kinda on my own if I run into any issues.
I guess this whole topic is more curiousity to see if there are actually plugin developers still actively developing on bubble, or if they’ve gone elsewhere or maybe totally focused on the cash cow that is AI? I haven’t seen a single functionality addition to any of my plugins in about 9 months now - just “documentation updates” or “server side updates” - so from my view at least, the plugin landscape seems to be very, very quiet.
Interesting discussion. I do plugin work full-time so keep a pretty close eye on the marketplace.
I definitely see a lot of new plugin creators releasing plugins, but then abandoning them after a few months.
I suspect its because they realise:
It takes a lot of work to maintain / support plugins
It’s really hard to generate meaningul revenue from them (if you’re building paid plugins)
If you have other priorities (freelance client work, full-time job, other projects) I’m guessing its just hard to justify spending lots of time on plugins.
Which makes sense, even if its not great for the end users.
I used to use it extensively in all of my apps, mostly for the pagination and the holding of lists. I never could fully wrap my head around all of it’s potential as I couldn’t understand the javascript functions built into it. But, Keith helped me with some critical functionality I would have never been able to achieve on my own, and I always recommended the plugin.
I am now. Mostly because some of the plugins that I used so extensively are no longer available, so I needed some ways to replace their functionality. I’ve also wanted to fix some issues, and overall improve the way I build. I’ve been building out my Data Jedi plugin and using it in all of my apps now. In doing that, I think it would help people who use it feel at ease around whether or not it will be maintained and bug fixes pushed, but also that new features will be added and nice little updates for big improvements will find their way into the plugin over time.
One example of that is I just updated the plugin as I’m building in a client functionality to switch all checkbox fields to yes/no fields to allow for more dynamic possibilities. Specifically it allows me to use one plugin element instead of two, or needing to have a conditional on the element and can instead just tie in a dynamic expression with ‘in-line’ conditionals to evaluate to yes/no.
I’m not sure how larger agencies that develop plugins handle things like that, or how many plugin developers are using everything they build in their own apps, but I think overall, most plugin developers I’ve seen as active are pretty easy to reach and seem eager to support their plugins.
This seems to support my observation that the landscape has become very quiet. The entire plugin marketplace is a key differentiator with bubble compared to other platforms, but seems for whatever reason (anecdotally) just isn’t as active as it used to be. Again, it could just be due to the plugins I am using being fairly mature - but prior to ~9 months, I was seeing updates for almost all of them every other week.
I would probably have been playing with a plugin like this, had I stayed using the bubble backend - but the WU costs for my use case (B2C) were just completely impossible to absorb in my situation, so doing a full backend migration to Xano was my only feasible option. However, the Xano Connector plugin was causing me no end to issues, and after struggling for months with no response from the developers, I gave up and forked it to my own (currently private) “Xano Backend” plugin. It’s quite a basic plugin, but was built around a simple premise - do as much as possible client-side to minimise WU costs, and play nice with core bubble authentication. I was able to achieve this, but it was an incredibly steep learning curve due to the near total absence of practical training on building plugins. I use it in my app to allow hybrid authentication, whereby a user session logs into both bubble and Xano, allowing all the core functionality of both platforms. This approach brought my (in development) WU usage from about ~2000 down to 3 (!!!), so it was well worth the effort in my case!
Now with how quiet the plugin marketplace has been, has got me wondering if the effort was worthwhile, or if there is something else going on I wasn’t aware of.
I honestly wouldn’t know as I have never paid much attention to plugin marketplace generally, although I do checkout showcase forum posts which helps me stay updated on what is available. In the past I’ve seen a showcase page, only to return 6 months later when I need the functionality.
I say no matter the state of the marketplace, your effort was worthwhile as long as it is working well for you and you are getting the best of both worlds from it.
But, if there is a noticeable slowdown in the pace of new plugin releases, or updates to existing plugins in the form of new features, I’d say it could be that people have many more things to pay attention to now and might be distracted. There is a lot of changing going on in the world right now.
I will add another thing: A lot of plugin was released but the market for that was very small. There’s also a lot of competitors and a lot of author doesn’t check them before they create their own.
I built some plugins and choose to sell them because I didn’t get enough time to maintain them. When you create good plugins with high rating, you will get offers from ZQ or others companies to sell them. This is what I did (to Thimo first an he choose to sell them to ZQ after).
I build plugins for my own use cases. All of which I publish for free with the caveat that I offer limited support for my plugins.
At the end of the day using any kind of plugin is going have the risk of no support. I’ll have to give kudos to the Zerocode support team when compared to other plugin builders.
We built multiple plugins for Bubble, and we used to fix user issues in hours, not even days. You can ask our users — they will confirm PluginCraft Contributor Profile | Bubble
A big part of the issue is driven by the poor plugin developer experience and the time it takes to see traction for a plugin. Someone gets into building plugins, puts together a few (often with a few swear words in between), doesn’t see much adoption and then drops them, leading to a huge number of “dead” plugins on the marketplace.
And don’t get me started on the plugin editor…
Ideally Bubble invests in improving the tooling for plugins if they want to encourage longer term, higher quality plugins.
That said, there’s a couple of great plugin developer focused tools that are making it a bit easier. Bask (by @zelus_pudding ) does an amazing job of improving the DX by allowing a dev to build their plugin in VSCode (or Cursor) and on the plugin management side, PluginPulse (shameless plug since I’m building it) helps the devs grow smarter and more consistently.
All in all, I’m hoping more tools come around to make it even easier to build and maintain great plugins.
The whole problem of dead plugins on the marketplace got me thinking.
I also noticed that Bubble’s “updated” info isn’t always reliable.
So, I built a little free Chrome extension that enhances plugin page using existing Bubble data - now you can instantly see if a plugin dev is still active or not. It shows you:
The latest plugin version, when it was updated and latest release note from the dev
The average rating across all plugins from the creator
When the dev was last active (based on their most recent plugin update)
A carousel of the creator’s other plugins (at the moment it takes two clicks just to see their other plugins, which I personally found a pain)
