RailsAdmin VS Forest Admin

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

RailsAdmin

RailsAdmin is a Rails engine that provides an easy-to-use interface for managing your data (by railsadminteam)

Forest Admin

💎 Ruby on Rails agent for Forest Admin to integrate directly to your existing Ruby on Rails backend application. (by ForestAdmin)
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RailsAdmin Forest Admin
9 15
7,849 359
0.2% 1.4%
7.5 8.4
26 days ago 2 days ago
Ruby Ruby
MIT License GNU General Public License v3.0 only
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.

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.

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

What are some alternatives?

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

ActiveAdmin - The administration framework for Ruby on Rails applications.

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

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

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.

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

Avo - Build Ruby on Rails apps 10x faster

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

Directus - The Modern Data Stack 🐰 — Directus is an instant REST+GraphQL API and intuitive no-code data collaboration app for any SQL database.

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.

Godmin - Admin framework for Rails 5+