Madmin alternative: Avo vs Madmin for your Rails admin

credit where it's due

What Madmin gets right

Madmin is a well-made gem with an active maintainer. Before you replace it, here's what you'd be giving up.

the real difference

Same repo, different amount already built

This isn't a hosted tool against a gem. Both are Rails engines, both are configured in Ruby you review in pull requests, and both read your own models. The difference is what happens after the CRUD screens: with Madmin you write the rest yourself, and with Avo your team starts from parts that are already built, documented and maintained.

where Avo comes in

What your team gets with Avo

You add the gem and write resources in app/avo, the same way you'd write them in app/madmin. Then the parts you'd otherwise build are a few lines each.

1. 01

   Actions your team can run on their own

   Refund a charge, approve a batch of orders, resend an invite. An action asks for the inputs it needs, confirms before it runs, and works on one record or a selection. No extra route or controller.

2. 02

   Permissions written once

   With the Authorization add-on, a Pundit policy decides which rows a person loads, which fields they see and which actions they can run. The same rule holds in the API and the MCP server, so your agents work inside the limits your team does.

3. 03

   Finding the record in seconds

   Search and filters come with Avo. Dynamic Filters let support combine conditions on any column, and Global Search finds a customer from one box, across every resource.

4. 04

   Agents that already know it

   More than 30 agent skills ship inside the gem, pinned to the version you run, and every feature is documented on a versioned docs site. Your coding agent writes a short resource instead of a stack of controllers you then have to review.

Here's a refund action. It's the whole thing: the form field, the confirmation and the bulk run come with it.

# app/avo/actions/refund_charge.rb
class Avo::Actions::RefundCharge < Avo::BaseAction
  self.name = "Refund charge"
  self.message = "Refund the selected charges?"

  def fields
    field :reason, as: :textarea
  end

  def handle(query:, fields:, **)
    query.each { |charge| charge.refund!(reason: fields[:reason]) }
    succeed "Refunded #{query.count} charges"
  end
end

side by side

Avo vs Madmin, in one view

to be fair

When we'd point you to Madmin instead

Avo isn't the right call for every app. Keep Madmin, or pick it, when:

Once support, ops or finance work in the admin every day, the trade flips. On Jumpstart Pro you don't have to choose all at once: start from the Jumpstart Pro blueprint, mount Avo beside Madmin, and move one resource at a time.