Forest Admin VS Administrate

https://www.forestadmin.com https://www.gravitee.io/

I didn't have a spare node app sitting around, so I found Forest Admin. This is actually a cool product which provides the simplicity of dashboard tools like ActiveAdmin or Retool, but preserves the privacy of the data by having you self-host the backend. The backend exposes an API that is used by the frontend client, i.e. your browser, so data doesn't need to move through Forest Admin's servers. Here's a nice graphic to visualize how this works:

Disclaimer: I'm the founder of (Forest Admin)[https://www.forestadmin.com].

Wow, I'm impressed by the number of solutions out there. Back at the beginning of Forest Admin, we were alone on the market, which is generally not a good sign. But our perseverance paid off, and it was definitely worth it in the end!

Alright, so why Forest Admin? :)

Because we only focus on the admin panel use case. Not the entire internal tools world. In this way, we are able to provide a fully-featured SaaS Admin panel out of the box. No need to build it, nor with code, nor with low/no code tools.

Even if your app, internal processes and so your admin panel is specific, we have designed our solution accordingly with 2 things that are part of our DNA from the beginning:

1/ We generate all the backend code required to an admin panel. All CRUD routes, filtering & search, dashboarding, permissions, etc. Everything is automatically generated in a few seconds based on datasource introspection. In the end, the generated code is just a standard REST API, so you can extend/override it without any limitations.

2/ We pre-built the admin UI with every admin standard features available out of the box, with a big focus on providing a great UI/UX possible for operational people. We obviously also provide all the low/no code features to customize pretty much anything. We also provide a feature called "Workspace" (which is generally the core of what our competitors do) that allow users build custom views using drag'n'drop of UI components from scratch.

For home-lab/internal UIs, you can go a long way with the auto-generated model-admin pages from Django. If you just need CRUD and actions triggered on a list of models, you can typically avoid any UI work and just define a few Admin classes, and if you need to make custom forms it's quite easy using Django's templating machinery to override individual pages.

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/4.0/ref/contrib/admin/

A similar modular admin system that's more generic is https://www.forestadmin.com/, I think this one has a layout editor too. But that one requires a REST API and so it may require more plumbing, depending on what you've already built. Or it could fit nicely on top of what you already have, if you already have APIs for everything.

In this blog, we'll see how to build a CRUD app with Forest Admin. We'll assume you're building a CRUD app for a PostgreSQL database.

At Forest Admin, we build admin panels for which we need to compute and cache large JSON documents. These documents are stored in redis and retrieved from this storage in order to be as fast as possible.

At Forest Admin, we recently faced this issue to move data from a Postgresql database to ElasticSearch.

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Forest Admin (https://www.forestadmin.com/). They have a free tier that would work on simple scenarios.

I haven’t used this personally, but heard good things about forest admin: https://www.forestadmin.com

thoughtbot/administrate is a well-known framework for administrative screen, but it's not developer friendly。I implement my own template files for Administrate, so when new Administrate version released, It is hard to update Administrate because template file is changed.**

I work at thoughtbot, you might know us for our open source work like administrate, factory_bot or shoulda-matchers.

This looks very similar to Administrate by thoughtbot https://github.com/thoughtbot/administrate

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.

We have already covered many use cases for customisation, everything else can be found in the official documentation.

You can also open in your browser, the official repository here, and the docs here, it will be helpful.

Administrate

I usually tend to create these from Scratch, but moving forward I’ve started to use thoughtbot’s administrate gem. It sticks to the Rails conventions of controllers and routing, so it’s easy to customise and add new functionality to.

Documentation https://administrate-demo.herokuapp.com/

Repository https://github.com/thoughtbot/administrate