RailsAdmin VS Thoughtbot Administrate

RailsAdmin

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

Thoughtbot Administrate

Administrate is a library for Rails apps that automatically generates admin dashboards.

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2023-10-14

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2023-09-12

RailsAdmin

Website: github.com
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Thoughtbot Administrate

Website: github.com
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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Outdated Documentation
Some users find the documentation lacking or outdated, which can complicate the setup and customization process, especially for newcomers.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.

Thoughtbot Administrate features and specs

Customizability
Administrate is highly customizable, allowing developers to extend and modify the dashboard to fit their specific needs. This flexibility is ideal for complex applications that require tailored admin interfaces.
Rails Friendly
Administrate is designed to work seamlessly with Ruby on Rails applications, leveraging Rails conventions and making it easy to integrate into existing projects.
Active Community
There is an active community and regular updates to the repository. This ensures that bugs are addressed and new features are integrated, making it a stable choice for long-term projects.
Simple User Interface
The user interface of Administrate is intentionally simple and minimalistic, which helps in keeping the admin dashboard clean and easy to navigate.

Possible disadvantages of Thoughtbot Administrate

Limited Features Out-of-the-box
Compared to other admin interfaces, Administrate offers fewer features by default. This might require additional development time to implement features like advanced filtering and UI components.
Performance Constraints
In large-scale applications, Administrate can experience performance issues, particularly when dealing with large datasets, which might require additional optimization efforts.
Basic Authorization
Administrate does not have built-in support for complex authorization schemes; developers need to manually implement and configure their own authorization logic, often using additional gems.
Styling Limitations
While Administrate offers a clean UI, customizing the styling can be more challenging compared to other solutions that allow greater control over the UI look and feel.

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to RailsAdmin and Thoughtbot Administrate)

Thoughtbot Administrate

Data Dashboard

52 52%

Data Dashboard

48% 48

Developer Tools

67 67%

Developer Tools

33% 33

No Code

45 45%

No Code

55% 55

Productivity

44 44%

Productivity

56% 56

User comments

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

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, RailsAdmin should be more popular than Thoughtbot Administrate. It has been mentiond 8 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 / over 1 year 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 / almost 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: over 3 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 / over 3 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: over 3 years ago

Thoughtbot Administrate mentions (5)

The Admin Framework for Minimalist
Thoughtbot/administrate is a well-known framework for administrative screen, but it's not developer friendly。I implement my own template files for Administrate, so when new Administrate version released, It is hard to update Administrate because template file is changed.**. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
Get help from thoughtbot for free (mentoring / office hours)
I work at thoughtbot, you might know us for our open source work like administrate, factory_bot or shoulda-matchers. Source: almost 3 years ago
Show HN: Build Ruby on Rails apps 10x faster – Avo
This looks very similar to Administrate by thoughtbot https://github.com/thoughtbot/administrate. - Source: Hacker News / almost 3 years ago
Rails administrate : big tutorial, bits of philosophy
You can also open in your browser, the official repository here, and the docs here, it will be helpful. - Source: dev.to / about 3 years ago
Free trial feature
That's exactly what we do. Easy to extend trials as needed for users when needed too via https://github.com/thoughtbot/administrate. Source: over 3 years ago