RailsAdmin VS Active Admin

RailsAdmin

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

Active Admin

The administration framework for business critical Ruby on Rails applications.

Landing page //
2023-10-14

Landing page //
2023-07-30

RailsAdmin

Website: github.com
$ Details

Edit details

Active Admin

Website: activeadmin.info
$ Details

Edit details

RailsAdmin features and specs

Ease of Use
RailsAdmin provides a simple and intuitive interface, making it easy for developers to set up and manage administrative tasks in a Rails application.
Customizability
The tool offers extensive customization options, allowing developers to tailor the admin dashboard to suit specific needs and integrate with existing functionalities.
ActiveRecord Integration
RailsAdmin seamlessly integrates with ActiveRecord, the default ORM for Rails, enabling easy management of database records without additional configurations.
Rich Features
It comes with a variety of built-in features such as filtering, searching, and sorting, which enhance the user experience and efficiency in managing application data.
Community Support
Being a well-known tool in the Rails community, RailsAdmin benefits from a wealth of community contributions, resources, and plugins that can extend its functionality.

Possible disadvantages of RailsAdmin

Performance Overhead
RailsAdmin can introduce performance overhead, especially in applications with large datasets, as its dynamic nature can affect load times and responsiveness.
Limited Customization of Views
While customization is a strength, there are limitations in how deeply you can customize the look and feel of the RailsAdmin interface without delving into complex overrides.
Outdated Documentation
Some users find the documentation lacking or outdated, which can complicate the setup and customization process, especially for newcomers.
Dependency Management
RailsAdmin comes with several dependencies, which might conflict with other gems or lead to version compatibility issues over time.
Lack of Built-in Role Management
By default, RailsAdmin does not come with built-in role or permission management, requiring additional gems or custom implementations for projects that need these features.

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.

RailsAdmin videos

No RailsAdmin videos yet. You could help us improve this page by suggesting one.

Add video

Active Admin videos

+ Add

Harry Potter and the Active Admin

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to RailsAdmin and Active Admin)

Active Admin

Data Dashboard

64 64%

Data Dashboard

36% 36

Developer Tools

45 45%

Developer Tools

55% 55

No Code

42 42%

No Code

58% 58

Design Tools

100 100%

Design Tools

0% 0

User comments

Share your experience with using RailsAdmin and Active Admin. For example, how are they different and which one is better?

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Active Admin should be more popular than RailsAdmin. It has been mentiond 12 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.

RailsAdmin mentions (8)

Ask HN: Why aren't Django Admin style dashboards popular in other frameworks?
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... - Source: Hacker News / almost 2 years ago
From partials to ViewComponents: writing reusable front-end code in Rails
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... - Source: dev.to / over 3 years ago
Admin Framework for Rails
Https://github.com/railsadminteam/rails_admin Is very popular and I find it very easy to use. Source: almost 4 years ago
🤷‍♀️ The easiest way to monitor your app in production is email?
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. - Source: dev.to / almost 4 years ago
RailsAdmin: How to disable edit action?
I'm working on a rails project with rails_admin and multiple models. There are several people working on the backend and I want to remove the ability to edit some of the records which have a imported boolean set to true. This records should just be readable in rails_admin. Source: almost 4 years ago

Active Admin mentions (12)

Goravel: A Go framework inspired by Laravel
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... - Source: Hacker News / 7 months 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 1 year 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 2 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: about 3 years ago
Show HN: Build Ruby on Rails apps 10x faster – 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 / over 3 years ago