Thinking of migrating from Webflow to Bubble. Looking for insights

Hi guys. I’m running a website called Fieldtrips.io that I’ve built in Webflow. The styling and animation features in Webflow is phenomenal, but there’s a few key features I know I will never be able to build in there.

I just found Bubble and I’m thinking maybe this might be powerful enough for it to be worth rebuilding Fieldtrips.io inside it.

First I need to evaluate if this is actually true, and for that I need your help. I’ll list some the key things I need Bubble to be able to do and then I’ll pray to the FSM that someone with deep knowledge can give me an estimated yay or nay on each of them.

  1. Create a database for “items”. An item is a conference with information like name, topic, city, description, image, date, location and a few more similar ones.

  2. Create multiple dynamic lists of those items that can be prefiltered. For example only show items that has a certain date or location.

  3. Filter inside those lists. Once the list is populated; I need to be able to apply multiple dropdown filters to it. For example topic, city or date. I need to update the content of the list without a page refresh (obviously). I’ve used mixitup.js for this previously.

  4. A “favourite system” where a user can click on a heart on an item and that item is then added to that specific users “favourite list”

  5. A login and a user profile page where I can display that users “favourite list”

  6. An email notification feature where I can send an email to a user when one of her favourited conferences has 4 weeks left before start date

  7. An RSS feature where I can aggregate new items using different filters. Preferably being able to setup specific RSS feeds with specific sets of filters (so far I’ve done this with Zapier, but they’re expensive). I do this to be able to send emails to users when a new item has been added in their location. If I can do this without using RSS feeds that’d also be acceptable.

Thank you so much in advance. I’m really hoping to get some positive answers as I’ve hit quite the dead end with Webflow.

Joakim
Fieldtrips.io

Hi Joakim,

I took a quick look at your list and I can confirm that I have successfully built every one of your features across my apps except #7. Although I haven’t built it myself, #7 should be doable.

Here’s a quick look at an app I built that does a lot of those items… www.stakk.co

Welcome to Bubble! I looked at your site a bit and your list of requirements. It should all be able to be done quite simply in Bubble.

  1. Create an Item Thing and add all needed fields.
  2. This would be done by setting a custom filtered state.
  3. Set the custom state from step 2 as the data source on your repeating group and filter it dynamically by the current values of the drop downs.
  4. This can be done by adding a simple list field called Favorites of type “Item” to the User Thing and simply adding or removing items when they click on the heart via the workflows.
  5. The login in and user is setup by default in Bubble. All you would need to do is simply create a page and display a repeating group that pulls its data from the user’s Favorites field.

I haven’t run into a situation where I needed to do anything like you need in 6 & 7 but I’m confident it wouldn’t be difficult to do. I’m sure there are plenty here who can tell you exactly how to do them.

Good luck!

Overall, what you’re describing can be achieved within Bubble. And you can likely do it significantly faster than it would take in Webflow.

I’ll admit that Bubble lacks some of the fine-grained design details that Webflow allows for. (It’s a tool well suited to those who have the inclination to tweak pixels to perfection). Webflow’s is great for static (marketing) sites but quickly becomes frustrating for application development (or even minor workflows) that Bubble makes quite simple.

There are a few good threads exploring Webflow versus Bubble. This one comes to mind (don’t let the title dissuade you…)

As previously said most of the features if not all are doable in Bubble.
However, I imagine you’ll have to upload most of your existing data at some point, and this is actually almost impossible at the moment.
I haven’t found how to efficiently upload data in Bubble (and I searched!) and it’s one of the reasons I’m not using it anymore at the moment.

(please someone tell me I’m wrong and show me the way :pray:)

What do you mean with impossible? You mean besides manually inputting it?

Webflow has an API, wouldn’t there be a way of importing the data?

What kind of data are you trying to upload into Bubble? You can import though the API or upload directly through the App Data screen.

@joakim Yes I mean besides manually inputting it.

@eli I’ll have to look into the API (any source), not sure I’ve got the skills but I’m learning.

Nothing special: infos and photo about businesses belonging to cities, in countries, etc.

And it’s frustrating 'cause Bubble makes it so easy to design and build your ideas, but I don’t want an empty app you know.

I’m no expert as I just managed to connect to my external data last week via the API Connector but I know it can be done. Good luck!