ActiveAdmin VS react-admin

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".

Github Link : https://github.com/activeadmin/activeadmin

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)

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/?

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.

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/

See an example: https://activeadmin.info It provides a fast way to create back office functionality.

[1] https://activeadmin.info/

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

> "Are there examples of companies adopting this model?"

Many examples across the industry:

- Autodesk AutoCAD (closed) + Plugins/Addons (many open)

- MS Windows (closed) + Many 3rd party programs (open)

- Github (closed) + Github Actions (open)

- Npm (closed) + Npm modules (mostly open)

> "What are the potential benefits or pitfalls?"

Benefits:

- Harder to replicate, the company gets to keep the "secret sauce" a secret

- Opening up a way to "extend" the platform means 3rd party developers add value to your system

- The core isn't open, so less effort is required to maintain compare to OpenSource

Pitfalls:

- Closed-source is hard to verify, company is essentially saying "trust me bro"

- Less innovation, as user's can't contribute to the core

> "How does it impact community engagement and software adoption?"

There's hardcore FOSS advocates that will hate anything not fully open. But a business has to make money and protect it's IP, having a "closed core" is one way to do that and ensure a sustainable business model.

Another approach is the opposite, open-core + closed-premium-addons. An example of this is "React Admin"

- Open Core -> https://github.com/marmelab/react-admin

- Premium Modules Offering -> https://react-admin-ee.marmelab.com/

Official Website: https://marmelab.com/react-admin/

React-Admin is a React-based frontend framework for building admin applications that talk to a backend data API. It offers a pluggable mechanism for easily adapting to the specific API style of your backend.

With these features, data fetching and forms become significantly easier to implement in React. However, creating a great user experience involves integrating all these hooks, which can be complex. Alternatively, you can use a framework like react-admin where user-friendly forms with optimistic updates are built-in.

31.react-admin

For the admin panel, or basically anything with basic crud operations, take a look at https://marmelab.com/react-admin/. Most frontend devs don't like it, since it limits you somewhat in customization, but at the same time, it is very easy to grasp for someone coming from a backend dev profile, who just wants a crud UI. It even has a guesser template that proposes an initial screen layout based on the response of your api, which you can then copy-paste and finetune. It is really made to make quick admin crud ui's.

We’ve developed a business based on an open-source platform called react-admin. Embracing the open-source spirit, we’re sharing the key performance indicators of this business. We hope it will help other open-source developers build their own business.

React-Admin: As the name suggests, this component library is targeted at building administrator interfaces for B2B (business-to-business), for example, managing users in your system. It is based on Material design and has a neat feature where you can let it “guess” your list views by providing a sample API endpoint for your data.

- We want a solution that creates CRUD (create, read, update, delete) quickly and requires minimal effort. - We want to be able to create some sort of complex interface if the task requires it. - We make cool, beautiful projects, so we want a visually pleasing solution. - We want the solution to be independent of the language on the back-end, because, for example, we started with PHP, Laravel, but over time node.js, Go appeared in the stack. In short, we want fast, beautiful and custom. We've had time to poke at various off-the-shelf solutions that we've been advised. They're good, but: - they are created specifically for some frameworks / languages like laravel, node.js - they can only generate CRUDs with a rigidly defined structure, where you can't implement or customize anything of your own. - they can't be styled Here's what we've been looking at Control Panels for Laravel: https://demo.backpackforlaravel.com/admin/dashboard Not a very pretty solution in our opinion. And the promo page has nice screenshots, not the demo "well such". https://orchid.software/en/ Not particularly functional, but neatly done https://nova.laravel.com They have a beautiful, but rigidly set strutkrua, you can not create castmon interfaces, stylize them. Just do CRUD and that's it. And it's paid https://filamentphp.com/ Analog to Nova, with essentially the same problems. For node.js: https://adminjs.co Nice promo, and the demo is way behind As standalone dashboards: https://strapi.io/ Very cool, but for other purposes. It's more of an entity builder with an interface and API https://pocketbase.io/ Similarly, it's an entity builder with an interface and API https://directus.io/ This is a backend builder. https://filamentphp.com/It is purely for php, you can't customize styles, you can't create your own interfaces. It is possible to create only tables and forms by template, and we remember that we want flexibility, independence from the language and the ability to create their own interfaces and customize them https://flatlogic.com This is also more of a backend builder. Direct competitors: https://github.com/refinedev/refine https://marmelab.com/react-admin/is probably the best solution that is currently on the market, they have been developing for a long time, they are our favorite. To the disadvantages we considered the following points: quite an old project, and somewhere the technology is already outdated, unsympathetic interface, old UI libraries. Huge documentation, it’s simply to create CRUD but hard to work without immersion. After all this there is only one conclusion: you need to do it yourself....