Thoughts on a this up and coming NoCode solution?

Questions
21

WeWeb is cool. So is Flutterflow. I’ve fiddled with them both and they’re nice, but I get a lot of non-tangible value out of Bubble that I lose when I move to a solution that doesn’t have a full stack setup. I’m really looking forward to seeing the new Bubble pricing structure as I’m expecting it to handle the issue of “scaling” in a more graceful manner.

At the end of the day, I don’t want to deal with infrastructure or code…I just want to focus on the parts of the app that add value. Code exportability doesn’t mean a ton to me because I don’t want to worry about maintaining it myself. There will always be differing opinions about that, and it’s totally fine, but I’m in the camp of wanting a solution that handles all the stuff “below the value line” so I can focus on what matters.

If you’re similar, then Bubble is awesome. If you’re interested in having control over what happens under the covers, then WeWeb + Xano (or another backend) would probably be a fine solution for you. In general, use the right tool for the job!

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22

Yeah, objects (the lack thereof) are kind of holding us back from many things – like supporting “offline mode” as another poster mentioned (but much else as well). If Bubble did have “in memory” objects, one could actually build a plugin to implement IndexedDB via Lexie and that “front end” database could be essentially a clone of the backend database. It’s wild how similar those architectures are.

@gazinhio, I’m not quite sure what you mean by “variables in backend workflows”? In my List Popper and Friends plugin, there are a couple of (VERY simple) SSAs that simply forward an evaluated expression to their outputs (Flow State and Flow State List) and so they can serve exactly this purpose. I know it would make more sense if there were a native action for that (and also if we could build a similar plugin for the client-side, which we cannot today because the client-side actions API does not return values to the workflow)… but it does exist today. (Granted, there is cold-start time for SSAs.)

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This are exactly my feelings on why I decided to stick with Bubble.

When i was looking to start building apps what was most intimidating to me was haing to learn to manage the different stacks, both in terms of time, manpower and cost.

I discovered no-code and found that most no-code builders were mostly front-end. Those that offered “full-stack” were just glorified WYSIWYG builders.

I eventually settled on AirTable (learned and used it for about a year) but back then it didn’t offer much for my users to interact with the data in ways that i wanted without spending more money on additional licenses or expensive 3rd party plugins which were pretty much just hacky methods of building a UI for AirTable. Though it was because of AT that i stumbled onto Bubble.

Bubble is perfect for a solo developer like myself. It’s extremely flexible, has almost no constraints on what i can build, has great plugons and a greater community but best of all is that I’ve had no friction expanding

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:point_up:this.

Yeah, if one wanted to build a “website”, there’s a metric s-ton of solutions, not all of which are any better than the dear-departed Adobe Muse. (Which made high performance static sites well before that was a cool thing.)

But Bubble (ever since I’ve been working with it) has been multitenant SaaS-in-a-box … for years. It has its warts, but what other solution has a database, (now more than) decent layout editor, user authentication, point-and-click scripting language, plugin architecture, “native” payments support, etc. that just work (should one choose to RTFM)?

There just aren’t any.

(That being said, Bubble is no replacement for solutions like Muse for that specific task… but most of the other no-code solutions strike me as glorified static site builders. Sure the web has moved on, and static + APIs is in a state far beyond what could be accomplished just a couple of years ago, but I’m glad there’s at least one no-code product focused on true web app development.

I’m still not sure there’s actually a market for such a thing, but it’s good to see Bubble plowing ahead and addressing the existing, various warts, if not with alacrity, but at least with regularity.)

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Bubble is the best tool for small business and MVP.
For medium business. Additionally, I will recommend a budget and application architect with some concerns.
To become the top visual programming tool, Bubble needs to add some features
By the way, I don’t like the term “No-Code” and the marketing of the tool as it is aimed at people without programming knowledge. With bubble, this is not true, but with other tools, it is true.
The following features would be helpful to me

• Enhancement the UI for the front end
• Enhancement the application scaling
• Enhancement the Workflow window designed to be more essay in read
• Allow to create reusable software Compound
• Allow to code Offline
• Allow to deploy on premise
• Allow to extract SQL Code
• Automatic generate full Application Business logic documenting

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O preço deste WeWeb é muito alto em coparação com o que ele NÃO TEM.
Ou seja: oferece menos recursos do que o Bublle sem ter pelo menos um banco de dados próprio.
Absurdo.
Acredito que NÂO decola como o Bubble!

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As someone posted on the forum recently, “If you think Bubble is only good for MVPs then you’re not trying hard enough”. It’s another one of those long-held myths about Bubble that is no longer relevant.

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In this post, I discuss what we did and what we tested.
Upon running the enterprise application, I will provide my option.

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Bubble is ~11 years old no-code tool. It’s easy to learn on disadvantages and limitations of your competitors and plan your architecture, tech stack, engine and features when you create a new no-code platform from a scratch while having a small base of customers and apps made on your platform. And it’s a very hard to change almost everything mentioned before when you are 11 years old and have tons of production apps running on your platform :slight_smile:

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A WeWeb/Xano/FlutterFlow early adopter here. It’s great that you brought this up - an opportunity for me to reflect on what I’ve been working on.

First of all, before going, I’d like to give it up to @gazinhio for the awesome argument. I’ve been working with dozens of traditional developers and clients in my country and they are all very conservative about development; they are very afraid of the vendor lock-in of the no-code platforms, hence the slow adoption rate of LCNC in my country. They tend to argue that vendor lock-in is danger such that they’d be doomed if Bubble for instance goes bankrupt (funny how this came from a startup yet to release their MVP). Having a firm dedicatedly oversees and updates your application code, dependencies, architecture and security is great - it’s the best developers can ask for, especially for startups and SMEs. Why would you want to take matters into your own hand while you have brilliant and well-funded developers taking care of those?

Anyway, I talked to both WeWeb representatives and Bubble sales team, and none of them argued that the other one would be their competitor. That I totally agree - Bubble and WeWeb position themselves very differently. There are so many things that I analyze, but in short:

  • I think Bubble is great for quick development, as the monolithic architecture saves a lot of time when connecting the FE to the BE. Besides, the abstraction of Bubble is very high and it helps non-developers to learn app development easier than WeWeb.
  • WeWeb’s main advantages are that they offer on-premise solution, easy external back-end integration (I believe Bubble is not very optimized for this), and easier custom components (as WeWeb is very low-level and you can easily add Vuejs code). WeWeb is geared towards developers.

Talking more about WeWeb’s pros and cons:

  • WeWeb used to be a JAMstack no-code platform, geared towards e-commerce apps with their JAMstack architecture since they joined YCom in 2021. However, they pivoted into a general-purpore no-code builder and changed their product a lot. I like how it’s FE-only, it creates a huge convenience for developers to work with their custom BEs.
  • Coming in the game later on, it inherits great UX practices from no-code builders like Webflow. I think this is a huge advantage as Bock (2021) argued that most of no-code builders on the market focus on functionalities too much and forget UX. Can’t blame Bubble for this, it’s been around for too long.
  • Their low-levelness allows greater customizability in comparison with Bubble. Although the build process is still problematic as their SDK is yet to be good.
  • The nature of their JAMstack architecture is that the platform is yet to be optimized for dynamic applications, as few static FE pages are required.
  • Obviously it takes longer to develop an app in comparison with Bubble, but it’s the trade-off when you need higher customization.

I’d love to have an AMA session here to further analyze the platforms and compare the pros and cons.

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31

@vu.tran I appreciate this very informative post.

Just an FYI, I’ve decided to keep moving forward with Bubble, I do believe it’s capable of achieving what I want for this specific app I’m building. I think any problems that I come across, I can find through by looking through the community for existing solutions or just ask the fairly active community here. Which is one of the benefits.

I’ve posted a few questions on the WeWeb side, and I do have a sense that the community is smaller, and the WeWeb team is smaller. But yet at the same time, they do seem like they want to be personally attentive, as I think they want more successful projects on their belt.

I played around with WeWeb, one of the disadvantages I came across is that, their ‘preview’ mode is rather mediocre, and doesn’t give me a true sense of how fast my website might actually end up being. I’m trying to build a SPA-styled app, and from what I understand, the pages there are actually automatically SPA as long as you instance specific sections of your site. Well during testing, whenever i select a new page or section to be shown, it takes a sometime for it to ‘load’ in the ‘preview’ of the editor. Whereas with Bubble, I can see it how my website will react pretty much exactly.

From what I understand, if i purchased a plan, I can actually deploy it to have a real demo of my build (Though I’m unclear if it’s fast-update-deployment like how bubble does it).

But there lies one of the issues is that one would have to pick a plan before getting to that stage, which I think is actually a bit of a deterrent to their growth.

I asked WeWeb if Offline-mode would be in their future, from what I’m told it’s basically a no until there’s ‘more-demand.’ I would like to think that the way WeWeb is built, it’s more possible, but I really couldn’t say. I plan to just keep my eye on WeWeb’s growth and for that matter FlutterFlow’s as well.

Bubble’s front-end can actually be quite snappy. Their editor needs an update, and not just visuals, basic custom components would be great…really great. It’s possible to get nice looking UI and UX’s built with Bubble…However, I think it is a bit more time consuming and difficult to get it consistent and uniform. (Ahem, custom components anyone?)

I have to admit, bubble is probably the best ‘NoCode’ solution, but I actually wouldn’t mind some custom code here and there to get things exactly the way I want, which is part of what gravitated me to WeWeb in the first place.

I’d love to know your experience or examples of work done on WeWeb.

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Great to hear that! Unfortunately I cannot share any work done with WeWeb due to NDAs, but I can say that the projects are huge and very complex! Doesn’t mean that Bubble cannot do the same thing - I have built sophisticated SaaS products with Bubble. I guess it takes trials and errors to find out the best tool for your needs.

By the way, if you are interested in custom components, my agency team developed a bunch of custom components for Bubble. You can find those built by CitizenDev in the shop. They are all free.

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