ActiveAdmin VS RailsAdmin

Compare ActiveAdmin vs RailsAdmin and see what are their differences.

ActiveAdmin

The administration framework for Ruby on Rails applications. (by activeadmin)

RailsAdmin

RailsAdmin is a Rails engine that provides an easy-to-use interface for managing your data (by railsadminteam)
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ActiveAdmin RailsAdmin
22 9
9,430 7,849
0.1% 0.2%
9.3 7.5
8 days ago 27 days ago
Ruby Ruby
MIT License MIT License
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

ActiveAdmin

Posts with mentions or reviews of ActiveAdmin. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-10-28.
  • Ask HN: Why aren't Django Admin style dashboards popular in other frameworks?
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 28 Oct 2023
    Can you clarify what's the "tremendous value" you're getting out of the Django admin?

    At Heii On-Call https://heiioncall.com/ we are using Active Admin https://activeadmin.info/ for Ruby on Rails, which seems quite similar to the Django admin. In my experience, it's mostly useful as a fairly basic read-only view of what's in the database. In Rails, it's so easy to whip together a custom view that we tend to do that, and the Active Admin is nice to have but I wouldn't say "tremendous value".

  • Top 5 Ruby on Rails Gems
    5 projects | dev.to | 4 Jan 2023
    Github Link : https://github.com/activeadmin/activeadmin
  • View code coverage (active_admin and orther .arb file)
    2 projects | /r/rails | 14 Sep 2022
    for those who know [https://activeadmin.info/](https://activeadmin.info/) it uses a file format [https://github.com/activeadmin/arbre](https://github.com/activeadmin/arbre)
  • Show HN: Build Ruby on Rails apps 10x faster – Avo
    12 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 21 Jun 2022
    Very neat! My first thought was that this was a competitor to https://bullettrain.co/.

    Looking into it a bit more, it seems more aimed at building admin panels than whole apps. I guess it competes against tools like https://activeadmin.info/?

  • From partials to ViewComponents: writing reusable front-end code in Rails
    11 projects | dev.to | 3 Jun 2022
    We briefly considered migrating to a full-grown Rails admin interface, such as ActiveAdmin, RailsAdmin, Administrate or Avo. We especially liked Avo which is built on a very modern stack similar to ours (Tailwind + Hotwire + ViewComponents). In the end, we didn’t go this route as we found some of the options a bit too restrictive (even though Avo is very flexible) and we did not feel like trying to amend it to our needs. For example, Avo renders forms in a 1-field-per-row layout while we wanted something more similar to the Tailwind UI Stacked form layout. Nevertheless, we found a great deal of inspiration in the Avo code and its design principles.
  • Ask HN: Easiest way to build a CRUD app
    19 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 13 Feb 2022
    I second Rails. It's incredibly polished and has really good gems to speed up dev. ActiveAdmin is a great gem if you need to quickly make an admin dashboard. It was useful when I had a small consultancy.

    https://activeadmin.info/

  • Admin Framework for Rails
    10 projects | /r/rails | 10 Nov 2021
    See an example: https://activeadmin.info It provides a fast way to create back office functionality.
    10 projects | /r/rails | 10 Nov 2021
    Until recently, my default Admin was ActiveAdmin library. But I found it a bit challenging onboarding new engineers with Inherited Resources gem. Also, a lot is changed on the frontend side with webpack, and now esbuild. I would like to use TailwindCSS to simplify the development. IMHO, ActiveAdmin legacy makes it way more complicated for customization to a new project.
  • We built an open-source platform (3k stars on GitHub) for building & deploying react based internal tools.
    3 projects | /r/reactjs | 13 Sep 2021
    [1] https://activeadmin.info/
  • Stop Building a General Purpose API to Power Your Own Front End
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 13 Sep 2021
    I can't speak much about Rails, as I've only played with it. But I've used a lot Django in the past.

    Regarding the Django admin (in rails you have ActiveAdmin[1]) think if it just as a glorified database explorer. It is an internal tool for developers, product managers and maybe for your support team. It is in no way thought to be used by end users. Every attempt I've seen to use it as such was a catastrophic failure.

    With Django, if you know plain HTML and CSS, with the tools I've mentioned in the comment you're responding to, you can build almost anything... For example, let's say you need a highly interactive client side table.... you can always just attach a Vue or a React component for it by using Unpoly compilers [2].

    I'd say this stack is less useful the more your app needs to work fully offline... but if you don't have that constraint... I cannot think of anything that can't be built faster and safer.

    [1] https://activeadmin.info/

    [2] https://unpoly.com/up.compiler

RailsAdmin

Posts with mentions or reviews of RailsAdmin. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-10-28.
  • Ask HN: Why aren't Django Admin style dashboards popular in other frameworks?
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 28 Oct 2023
    Like most things, it's probably a combination of things.

    The Django Admin existed before Django publicly existed. That meant that once anyone started using Django they knew that they should constrain their use of Django in certain ways so that the Django Admin would work with their usage. Features that would be added to Django would be built with the Django Admin in mind.

    Many tools like Flask or FastAPI don't have an opinionated model layer like Django. Without that, you can't really create an admin interface programatically. People could be storing their data in any sort of fashion anywhere. How would one build an admin system for something like Flask or FastAPI where there's no convention around how people set up data access? A lot of frameworks out there don't tell you "access your data in this way" or "this is how users will be authenticated." Without those two things, it's hard to really create an admin system.

    There are similar systems available for some frameworks, but since they aren't part of the core framework, they don't get the same attention. Someone creates it, but it doesn't have the kind of community buy-in that sustains it. One of the odd things about Django is that the admin system is under `django.contrib` which indicated that they didn't intend for it to be in the core of Django forever, but that's not really how `django.contrib` ended up. It continued to be a core part of Django maintained as part of the framework.

    Like I said, there are admin dashboards available in other frameworks like RailsAdmin (https://github.com/railsadminteam/rails_admin) or Core Admin for .NET (https://github.com/edandersen/core-admin) and I'm sure there's more. However, both Rails and .NET provide most of what Django provides (and a lot more than most frameworks). Rails and .NET both have a default data access ORM that a majority of people using those frameworks tend to use. .NET has built-in authentication/authorization so the admin can work off that. Rails doesn't have auth, but RailsAdmin uses some plugins.

  • From partials to ViewComponents: writing reusable front-end code in Rails
    11 projects | dev.to | 3 Jun 2022
    We briefly considered migrating to a full-grown Rails admin interface, such as ActiveAdmin, RailsAdmin, Administrate or Avo. We especially liked Avo which is built on a very modern stack similar to ours (Tailwind + Hotwire + ViewComponents). In the end, we didn’t go this route as we found some of the options a bit too restrictive (even though Avo is very flexible) and we did not feel like trying to amend it to our needs. For example, Avo renders forms in a 1-field-per-row layout while we wanted something more similar to the Tailwind UI Stacked form layout. Nevertheless, we found a great deal of inspiration in the Avo code and its design principles.
  • railstart-niceadmin support more features
    37 projects | /r/rails | 16 Feb 2022
    - [rails_admin](https://github.com/railsadminteam/rails_admin)
  • railstart-niceadmin release now!Backend management system based on Bootstrap 5 and NiceAdmin and Rails 7
    29 projects | dev.to | 27 Jan 2022
    rails_admin
  • Admin Framework for Rails
    10 projects | /r/rails | 10 Nov 2021
    https://github.com/railsadminteam/rails_admin is very popular and i find it very easy to use.
  • 🤷‍♀️ The easiest way to monitor your app in production is email?
    3 projects | dev.to | 19 Oct 2021
    It's really helpful to have a way to track what's going on with your application in production, things like: number of user sign ups, status of user accounts, number of X new database entries etc. Out of the box dashboards like Rails Admin are great but only go so far, eventually you will want significant customizations.
  • An Easy Admin Panel - Rails 6
    2 projects | dev.to | 28 May 2021
    Having an admin panel in your Rails application is honestly, to me, the best thing to do when it comes to keeping track of your users and giving them permissions. Finding out how to have an admin panel though, that was tough, mainly because I wasn’t searching for the right thing. The rails_admin gem, so simple but can control so much! The installation and usage is very simple depending on what you are trying to use it on. I should probably tell you, I am using devise with the user having a boolean attribute called admin.
  • Ask HN: What is an easy way to create web UIs as a back end dev/data scientist?
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 13 Mar 2021
    Check out Retool: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/1564

    A wswig for internal UI/dashboards has a lot of value for companies that don't have a dedicated internal tools team.

    My company had an internal tools teams at one point but it got killed because of other business priorities.

    We use https://github.com/sferik/rails_admin, that still requires development time and frontend knowledge, but the framework is terrible.

    https://marmelab.com/react-admin/ is much better but also required development time and frontend knowledge.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing ActiveAdmin and RailsAdmin you can also consider the following projects:

Administrate - A Rails engine that helps you put together a super-flexible admin dashboard.

Trestle - A modern, responsive admin framework for Ruby on Rails

Avo - Build Ruby on Rails apps 10x faster

go-admin - A golang framework helps gopher to build a data visualization and admin panel in ten minutes

motor-admin-rails - Low-code Admin panel and Business intelligence Rails engine. No DSL - configurable from the UI. Rails Admin, Active Admin, Blazer modern alternative.

ActiveScaffold - Save time and headaches, and create a more easily maintainable set of pages, with ActiveScaffold. ActiveScaffold handles all your CRUD (create, read, update, delete) user interface needs, leaving you more time to focus on more challenging (and interesting!) problems.

Forest Admin - 💎 Ruby on Rails agent for Forest Admin to integrate directly to your existing Ruby on Rails backend application.

daisyui - 🌼 🌼 🌼 🌼 🌼  The most popular, free and open-source Tailwind CSS component library

Typus