Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

NativeBase VS Active Admin

Compare NativeBase VS Active Admin and see what are their differences

NativeBase logo NativeBase

Experience the awesomeness of React Native without the pain

Active Admin logo Active Admin

The administration framework for business critical Ruby on Rails applications.
  • NativeBase Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-09-19
  • Active Admin Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-07-30

NativeBase features and specs

  • Cross-Platform Compatibility
    NativeBase offers components that work seamlessly across both iOS and Android, ensuring a consistent user experience across different devices.
  • Rich Component Library
    Provides a vast collection of pre-built UI components, such as buttons, forms, navigations, and more, significantly speeding up the development process.
  • Customization
    Highly customizable themes and components that allow you to match the look and feel of your app to specific design requirements.
  • Community Support
    Active community and extensive documentation make it easier to find solutions to common problems and get support from fellow developers.
  • Integration with React Native
    Designed to work specifically with React Native, offering better integration and performance compared to more generalized component libraries.
  • Accessible Design
    Offers components and practices aimed at making apps more accessible, which is crucial for creating inclusive applications.

Possible disadvantages of NativeBase

  • Learning Curve
    Can have a steep learning curve for developers who are not familiar with React Native or component-based design.
  • Performance Overhead
    May introduce some performance overhead due to the abstraction layers, which might not be suitable for performance-critical applications.
  • Dependency Management
    Frequent updates and changes in the library can lead to dependency issues that require regular maintenance and updates.
  • Limited Advanced Customization
    While basic customization is easy, deeply customizing components to fit unique use cases can be challenging and may require additional effort.
  • Vendor Lock-in
    Relying heavily on any proprietary framework or library can make it difficult to switch technologies in the future, constraining flexibility.
  • Size
    The library can add to the overall size of the application, which might be a concern for apps where minimizing the footprint is crucial.

Active Admin features and specs

  • Rapid Development
    Active Admin allows for rapid development of back-end administration dashboards without having to code everything from scratch. It provides a default set of controllers, routes, and views that can be easily customized.
  • Rails Integration
    Built specifically for Ruby on Rails applications, Active Admin leverages Rails conventions and integrates seamlessly with its ecosystem, enabling a familiar and efficient development experience for Rails developers.
  • Rich Features
    Active Admin comes with a wide range of features like authentication, authorization, filtering, searching, and custom actions which can be customized to fit business requirements.
  • Community and Documentation
    Active Admin has a strong community and well-maintained documentation which provides support and resources for developers. The community contributes by sharing plugins and solutions to common problems.

Possible disadvantages of Active Admin

  • Customization Complexity
    Once you move beyond basic customizations, making extensive changes to the default behavior or appearance can be complex and require a deeper understanding of both Active Admin and Rails.
  • Performance
    Due to the abstraction and additional layers provided by Active Admin, it might not be the best choice for high-performance applications, especially when dealing with large datasets.
  • Dependency on Rails
    Active Admin is tightly coupled with Rails, which means it cannot be used for non-Rails applications, limiting its use for projects not based on this framework.
  • Version Compatibility
    As both Rails and Active Admin evolve, there might be compatibility issues between different versions, which could require upgrades or modifications in your existing codebase.

NativeBase videos

NativeBase Market Purchase Flow

Active Admin videos

Harry Potter and the Active Admin

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to NativeBase and Active Admin)
Development Tools
100 100%
0% 0
Developer Tools
65 65%
35% 35
Data Dashboard
0 0%
100% 100
Design Tools
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, NativeBase should be more popular than Active Admin. It has been mentiond 22 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

NativeBase mentions (22)

  • Exploring the Best UI Component Libraries for React Native apps
    Gluestack, like any other customizable UI library, is built to make styling less cumbersome. It comprises a set of themed and unstyled components easily integrated across different platforms and devices. Originally, Gluestack was a part of NativeBase, a component library for both React and React Native. With performance and maintainability in mind, NativeBase was split into two parts, focusing on a universal... - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • Best headless UI libraries in React Native
    Just like the other libraries mentioned in this article, Gluestack is another unstyled component library. Originally a part of NativeBase, the developer team created this library to prevent bloat and enhance maintainability of the project. - Source: dev.to / almost 3 years ago
  • An Overview of 25+ UI Component Libraries in 2023
    KumaUI : Another relatively new contender, Kuma uses zero runtime CSS-in-JS to create headless UI components which allows a lot of flexibility. It was heavily inspired by other zero runtime CSS-in-JS solutions such as PandaCSS, Vanilla Extract, and Linaria, as well as by Styled System, ChakraUI, and Native Base. ### ๏ปฟVue. - Source: dev.to / almost 3 years ago
  • 7 Popular React Native UI Component Libraries You Should Know
    NativeBase is a collection of essential cross-platform React Native components. The components are built with React Native combined with some JavaScript functionality with customizable properties. NativeBase is fully open-source and has 18,000+ stars on GitHub. - Source: dev.to / over 3 years ago
  • React vs React Native: How Different Are They, Really?
    CSS-based UI libs don't make sense on mobile; your new options include NativeBase, React Native Elements and others). Some web-based UI libs do have RN siblings though - such as React Native Material and React Native Paper (for Material-UI), and tailwind-rn (for Tailwind). This just means new decisions to make, some learning, and new paradigms for how to use the new libs. - Source: dev.to / over 3 years ago
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Active Admin mentions (12)

  • Goravel: A Go framework inspired by Laravel
    Same reason IDEs โ€” when you really know them โ€” 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... - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
  • Use Rails
    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... - Source: Hacker News / over 2 years ago
  • Ask HN: Why aren't Django Admin style dashboards popular in other frameworks?
    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... - Source: Hacker News / almost 3 years ago
  • View code coverage (active_admin and orther .arb file)
    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). Source: almost 4 years ago
  • Show HN: Build Ruby on Rails apps 10x faster โ€“ Avo
    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/? - Source: Hacker News / about 4 years ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing NativeBase and Active Admin, you can also consider the following products

React Native - A framework for building native apps with React

RailsAdmin - A Rails engine that provides an easy-to-use interface for managing your data

React Native Desktop - Build OS X desktop apps using React Native

Slick - A jquery plugin for creating slideshows and carousels into your webpage.

React Native UI Kitten - Customizable and reusable react-native component kit

Sequel Pro - MySQL database management for Mac OS X