Forest Admin VS Directus

Compare Forest Admin vs Directus and see what are their differences.

Forest Admin

๐Ÿ’Ž Ruby on Rails agent for Forest Admin to integrate directly to your existing Ruby on Rails backend application. (by ForestAdmin)

Directus

The Modern Data Stack ๐Ÿฐ โ€” Directus is an instant REST+GraphQL API and intuitive no-code data collaboration app for any SQL database. (by directus)
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Forest Admin Directus
15 206
358 25,113
1.1% 2.3%
8.4 9.9
14 days ago 3 days ago
Ruby TypeScript
GNU General Public License v3.0 only GNU General Public License v3.0 or later
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.

Forest Admin

Posts with mentions or reviews of Forest Admin. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2022-11-04.
  • Je m'ennuie ร  mourir en startup
    2 projects | /r/AntiTaff | 4 Nov 2022
    https://www.forestadmin.com https://www.gravitee.io/
  • Running Node.js on AWS serverless with Fargate
    2 projects | dev.to | 30 Oct 2022
    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:
  • Experiences with low-code systems (Budibase,Appsmith etc.)?
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Jul 2022
    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.

  • Ask HN: What's is your go to toolset for simple front end development?
    46 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 7 Jul 2022
    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.

  • What is a CRUD app and how to build one?
    4 projects | dev.to | 12 May 2022
    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.
  • Large documents in redis: does it worth compressing them (Part 1)
    2 projects | dev.to | 28 May 2021
    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.
  • Extract-Transform-Load with RxJS: save time and memory with backpressure
    2 projects | dev.to | 20 Apr 2021
    At Forest Admin, we recently faced this issue to move data from a Postgresql database to ElasticSearch.
  • Ask HN: Best (Low-/No-Code) Solution for Simple Web-Based Database Front Ends
    36 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 1 Apr 2021
    I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Forest Admin (https://www.forestadmin.com/). They have a free tier that would work on simple scenarios.
    36 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 1 Apr 2021
  • Web interface for MySQL DB
    4 projects | /r/web_design | 7 Mar 2021
    I havenโ€™t used this personally, but heard good things about forest admin: https://www.forestadmin.com

Directus

Posts with mentions or reviews of Directus. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-02-22.
  • Form to DB
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 22 Feb 2024
    I don't know, it's something I've wanted many times.

    Recently I discovered https://directus.io/ which comes pretty close and it's open source.

  • Open-Source Headless CMS in 2024
    9 projects | dev.to | 30 Jan 2024
    Directus: The Shape-Shifting Maverick
  • A Year of Self-Hosting: 6 Open-Source Projects That Surprised Me in 2023
    2 projects | dev.to | 19 Dec 2023
    The Backend to Build Anything or Everything | Directus
  • Prismic.io is increasing our price by *1900%* over Christmas
    4 projects | /r/webdev | 8 Dec 2023
    Along those lines, Iโ€™ve been happy with Directus as a backend for my little blog.
    4 projects | /r/webdev | 8 Dec 2023
    I using Directus CMS on several projects with pretty complicated flows, api extensions etc. probably there will be some work if you move. I liked Directus is because it's standard SQL I can always move my DB and documents to another solution. I don't use their hosted solution but they have an unlimited offering for $100 / month.
  • Why Is the Django Admin "Ugly"?
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Oct 2023
    It depends on your skillsets, but I'd highly recommend https://directus.io/ especially if you need "slickness" to raise money otherwise try a pyhat stack if you hate javascript.
  • Building a Blog in Django
    12 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Sep 2023
    The admin is extremely unacceptable for anything beyond trivial borderline trivial use cases, and the modifications you'd have to make are just awful especially the more interactive something needs to be. The extremely tight integration between models and the modeladmin is a blessing and curse.

    The people who like Django,also tend to overload it to do everything. This makes sense at small companies. The only place I really see Django at large companies is as an api using DRF or something.

    For internal admins, I've been lobbying to use https://directus.io/ at my company.

  • Show HN: I built a Python web framework from scratch
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 9 Sep 2023
  • I need recommendations for creating an API. Start from scratch, or are there projects I can build from?
    2 projects | /r/webdev | 20 Aug 2023
    I initially looked into CMS's like Strapi and Directus to possibly handle my admin UI + API all at once. I haven't found anything that looks like it can do this yet, but I'd be very happy to be proven wrong. I would prefer it to be based in .NET or Node.js since I am more familiar with those, but there's no reason I couldn't do PHP either.
  • Pros and cons of off-the-shelf solutions for creating a control panel
    6 projects | /r/reactjs | 13 Jul 2023
    - 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, itโ€™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....

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Forest Admin and Directus you can also consider the following projects:

supabase - The open source Firebase alternative.

Strapi - ๐Ÿš€ Strapi is the leading open-source headless CMS. Itโ€™s 100% JavaScript/TypeScript, fully customizable and developer-first.

Appwrite - Build like a team of hundreds_

budibase - Budibase is an open-source low code platform that helps you build internal tools in minutes ๐Ÿš€

KeystoneJS - The most powerful headless CMS for Node.js โ€” built with GraphQL and React

appsmith - Platform to build admin panels, internal tools, and dashboards. Integrates with 25+ databases and any API.

nocodb - ๐Ÿ”ฅ ๐Ÿ”ฅ ๐Ÿ”ฅ Open Source Airtable Alternative

Baserow - Open source no-code database and Airtable alternative. Create your own online database without technical experience. Performant with high volumes of data, can be self hosted and supports plugins

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

nextjs-custom-server - A TypeScript boilerplate for combining Payload and Next.js into a single Express server

react-admin - A frontend Framework for building data-driven applications running on top of REST/GraphQL APIs, using TypeScript, React and Material Design

ERPNext - Free and Open Source Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)