How does Avo compare with the competition?

We're biased, but we think Avo is the best admin panel framework for Rails. That doesn't mean that the other alternatives are bad, it just means that Avo picked up where other admin frameworks left and improved on their shortcomings.

And if the thing you don't have time for is replacing an admin you already run, that's smaller than it sounds: Avo mounts beside your current admin in the same app, so you can rewrite your admin one resource at a time in about a week.

Deciding wether to use an admin framework like Avo or any of its alternatives depends on the amount of time you want to put up-front to build your admin panel. If you want to be up and running in a few hours you should use Avo or the alternative you like the best. If you are willing to put in the hours to build your own admin panel, you can build it from scratch or use custom scaffolding.

In the end, there's no right or wrong answer. It all depends on your project, your experience and your goals. If you've never used a Rails admin panel you can take Avo for a test ride and decide if it's an adequate solution for you.

As with anything, it depends. Active Admin and Rails Admin are proven solutions that have been around for a while. This has it's advantages but it also presents some disadvantages like older dependencies, lack of active and vigorous development, unmaintained third party plugins, a user experience that could be better and some issues like lack of udpated documentation or an active community.

On the other hand, Avo is a modern solution that has been around for less than 4 years and is still currently receiving love from its developers and awesome community. Even though Avo is not as popular yet as Rails Admin or Active Admin, it's surely on the way to becoming a widely adopted solution because it embraces modern Rails development and its current ways.

Customization is one of the blocking issues for people when it comes to using an admin panel gem for Rails.

It's certainly not impossible tu customize your admin panel when you choose any admin alternative for Rails. However, it can insume a lot of time and effort and make you feel like you're fighting against the framework instead of focusing on your project.

Actually, the same can be said about every admin solution out there: there's a tradeoff between the initial development speed and feature richness and the fact that customizing any admin panel framework is not free: it will certainly cost you more than just coding the views by yourself.

Having said this, Avo is built with the idea that customization should not be a huge blocker and that's why we've put a lot of effort into making Avo as customizable as possible without the usual headaches presented by our antecessors.

Your concern is understandable. There are free admin panel solutions out there and they're the majority in the Rails world. But, Avo having paid tiers doesn't mean you can't use it for free to start building your next project.

Actually, about 70% of every feature Avo has is available in the free plan. This means that you can enjoy Avo's progress even if you're not a paying customer.

Plus, Avo being a paid solution means that we can really focus on building Avo full-time and improve it with customer and user feedback so it gets better for everyone, even for those that don't plan to pay for their admin framework.

Avo is built by an admin of two and we're as focused as you can get to make the best Rails admin panel even better. So, the takeaway is: even if you're not planning on using our paid plans, you benefit from them because new features end up on the free plan constantly.