The relationship status between me and the Bubble plugin store is complicated. On one hand, there is honestly a lot in there that is just not ready for prime time, and don’t have the stability for a commercial app yet. I’m not saying this to insult anyone, just pointing out a fact that Bubble and it’s store is still young, and both the content (plugins) and the way to rate and find them (the store) still needs a lot of development to compete with established plugin catalogues like Wordpress. Having said that, I’m not looking for another discussion on the plugin ecosystem, of which there are plenty.
What I am interested in though, is to identify the best of the best available in the store right now. I’m talking plugins that have helped you solve problems, proven to be stable and have great support. Free or paid, it doesn’t matter.
I love this post!
I use and rely on as few plugins as possible, as my #1 need for my app is reliability.
At the moment I rely on:
-Bubble Rich Text Editor
multi select input
stripe.js
Clicksend
Sendgrid
My own plugins I know I can support for stripe and shortcode replacement.
And in the future I hope to use 3rd party plugins for
The TP plugins I really really can’t live without …
Toolbox
Croppie (which is essential and critical to at least one app of mine)
I never use Plugins for APIs - I roll my own in the Connector.
Everything else is a bit “Meh”. Either it is just for prettiness (so it is not essential and I don’t want to tie myself to it) or it doesn’t work that well (sorry to say the the Air Date/Time picker is in this category).
Doesn’t mean I don’t use them, but I always make sure that if the plugin “fails” I can fall back to something else.
Some plugins I won’t use because of the author. Either I don’t know them, or they have in the past pushed something as a “Full xxxxx” when it was anything but.
Never paid for a plugin. Although I would pay for both Toolbox and Croppie.
But then I am not your typical Bubbler and I am not an early adopter in this case. Someone really would need to understand my pains to drag me over. But most plugins seem to address early Bubble usage, not late. And that is where the money is, not early stage MVP.
@lucasstyles123 well, many of them take existing features and just sexy them up a bit (like the datepicker I mentioned for example). So yes, kind of. For the whole website look though, you’ll probably want to look into templates instead.
I agree with several of your points. I see Bubble’s plugin ecosystem as pretty early-stage still, but I’m saying that with an optimistic tone. It’s a lot better now than it was a year ago, and I expect that development to continue. Still, I find myself (like you) avoiding plugins in client apps, and testing them in my “hobby project” apps for long-term stability instead. The part about “who is the author” is also 100% true – some offer excellent support, others not, and there’s no telling when an author suddenly packs his suitcase and leaves. With a more mature market where there are financial incentives to offer support, add features and fix bugs, I suspect we’ll iron out those creases though.
The datepicker I’ve found the be working quite well though. What kind of problems have you experienced?
I find myself getting more and more impressed by @gaurav’s suite of tools for Bubble. Some of them may seem complex for non-coding-developers at first glance, but boy can they simplify and speed up a lot of tasks in Bubble.
and I am not an early adopter in this case. Someone really would need to understand my pains to drag me over. But most plugins seem to address early Bubble usage, not late. And that is where the money is, not early stage MVP.