ActiveAdmin Alternatives

ActiveAdmin reviews and mentions

• Goravel: A Go framework inspired by Laravel
  9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 9 Mar 2025

  Same reason IDEs — when you really know them — allow for quicker development compared to using primitive text editors with a bunch of third-party plugins duck-taped together. When you understand the framework, everything is written to the same standard, behaves in similar ways, and is where you expect it to be. Adding things like background job processing requires changing one line of config.

  Also, one major thing I'm missing personally is automatically generated OpenAPI specifications + API documentation & API clients autogenerated from it. Last time I checked Go, you had to write the spec manually, which is just ridiculous — the code already has all the necessary info, and duplicating that effort is time-consuming and error-prone (the spec says one thing, the code does another). This may be out of date, but if it still isn't, it is enough to disqualify the stack completely for me.

  Also, I don't think there anything similar in the Go world to these administration panels:

  https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/5.1/ref/contrib/admin/

  https://activeadmin.info

  https://nova.laravel.com

  which are just fantastic for intranet projects and/or quick prototyping.

• ActiveAdmin v4 Beta: New Features, Upgrades, and How to Migrate
  2 projects | dev.to | 28 Oct 2024

  Review Deprecations: Check the UPGRADING.md guide for any deprecations or breaking changes that may affect your project.

• Use Rails
  8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 7 May 2024

  Rails is absolutely fantastic for projects below 10,000 lines with 1 or 2 contributors, especially if you want a classic forms-based UI. And you can get a huge amount done under those constraints in Rails.

  But as of couple of years ago, Rails came with a number of drawbacks:

  1. There was no really viable system of static typing that a significant number of people were enthusiastic about. See https://www.reddit.com/r/ruby/comments/105sdax/whats_the_lat... for a discussion.

  2. The lack of static typing meant far less IDE support. Fewer documentation tooltips, less autocompletion, etc.

  3. I used to do a lot of Rails consulting. And whenever I had to drop into a codebase with more than 50,000 lines or 5 active developers, it was generally a painful slog. Too many weird Rails plugins that stopped being maintained, too much magic, too many nasty surprises while refactoring.

  Basically, smaller Rails projects were an absolute delight. Larger Rails projects, though, tended to feel more like a swamp. Tools like https://activeadmin.info/ could tip the balance where applicable.

  I still think that small Rails projects are fantastic, and I don't think anything since has remotely matched Rails' productivity within that niche. There's just too much mature tooling, and much of it works together seamlessly. But not too many projects want classic multi-page apps right now, and small projects often grow up to be big projects.

• 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/

• Eager to help a Junior without experience?
  1 project | /r/rails | 8 Jan 2022
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