Rails Admin vs Active Admin

Rails Admin is a popular library to build admin panels for Ruby on Rails applications.

It allows you to build admin interfaces for your models quickly via a DSL (Domain Specific Language).

Some key features for Rails Admin are:

• Build CRUD interfaces from your resources: with Rails Admin you can generate CRUD interfaces for your resources using their DSL. This can save you a lot of time compared to building these interfaces from scratch.
• Search and filtering: you can easily search and filter the data from your resourcers. Advanced search and filtering require customization but the basics are there..
• Authentication and authorization: Rails Admin is easily integrated with authentication and authorization libraries like Devise or CanCanCan/Pundit.
• Export Capabilities: it allows you to export your admin data to CSV, XML or JSON files.
• Customizable Actions: You can define custom actions for models, allowing for more complex operations beyond basic CRUD.

Rails Admin is a good choice to get an admin panel up and running quickly and without too much effort.

Having an admin panel or internal tooling built based on your models is a sure way to save time.

But, it's worth noting that even if you can save time when starting out your application with Rails Admin, you will probably pay out some of that time in the long run, especially if you need a lot of customization.

Having been around for almost a decade, Rails Admin has a lot of features that make it a good choice to build admin experiences using Rails.

This doesn't mean it's perfect or that it doesn't have any cons.

Let's explore the pros first:

• Maturity: Rails Admin is a mature project with a lot of users and resources around it. It has been around for almost a decade and it's still being developed an maintained even if the pace of development has slowed down a bit.

• Feature set: Rails Admin has a feature set that allows you to build admin panels quickly from the resources you have in your application.

• ORM flexibility: with Rails Admin you can use Mongoid as your applications ORM in case you're not using ActiveRecord.

• Simple file uploads: Rails Admin allows you to upload files to your application without too much hassle.

Now let's see some of the cons for Rails Admin:

• Customization is difficult: even though Rails Admin development is somewhat active and features are being added. The pace of development is not as fast as it could be. This doesn't mean it's not a good choice per-se but it can be a problem if it doesn't fit your needs in its current form.

• Modest improvements: despite Rails Admin not being an abandoned library, it doesn't receive a lot of frequent updates. This is reasonable considering the age of the library but it also means that new features are rare and improvements are not frequent.

• A mediocre UI: Rails Admin has an acceptable UI when compared to Active Admin. However, it's not really modern and useable as it needs to be especially when considering what users expect from admin panels nowadays.

• Poor documentation: Rails Admin documentation resides mostly in their GitHub wiki page. This is not necessarily bad but it's not very convenient mostly because the fact it's not easily searchable and processable.

• Dependant on outdated third party plugins: some Rails Admin functionality is reached through third party plugins that might be outdated. This can be a problem if you're planning for the long term or depending on the library for a long time.

Active Admin is another popular option for creating Rails admin panels and internal tooling.

It's been around for around 14 years now and it's consider one of the defacto admin solutions for Rails.

Here's a list of some of the key features of Active Admin:

• Customization via DSL: you can generate and customize your admin panels and internal tooling using Active Admin's DSL.
• Built-in User Authentication: Active Admin comes with a Devise integration out of the box. It also favors the creation of an AdminUser class to separate concerns between admin and regular users authentication.
• Resource Management: you can manage your application's resources using .
• Dashboard Customization: You can create custom dashboards to show important info at a glance.
• Plugins and Extensions: There's a whole ecosystem of plugins that can add extra functionality to your admin panel.

As you can see, Acttive Admin has a lot of features and there's a reason it has stood the test of time within the Rails community..

However, it's not without its challenges. As your app grows, you will find that customizing Active Admin can be a challenge.

It can actually reach to the point where you get frustrated with the library to the point it feels like building everything from scratch could have been a better decision.

Having said this, lets look at the main pros and cons for Active Admin:

Given that it's been around for more than a decade, Active Admin has a lot of features that make it a good choice to build Rails admin panels.

Let's see its pros first:

• Maturity: Active Admin has stood the pass of time. It's a mature project with a lot of features and users. This means that you if you choose Active Admin you will have a lot of resources, third party code or past-experiences from users that have chosen the library before you.

• A powerful DSL: Active Admin's DSL is powerful and allows you to customize your admin panel to your needs. The learning curve is somewhat steep but it can be manageable, at least when starting out.

• An adequate set of features: Active Admin comes with an adequate set of features out of the box to help you build admin panels faster. Some of this features.

• A vast ecosystem: due to its popularity and the time it has been around. Active Admin has a lot of third-party plugins and resources. Some of them might be outdated as the writing of this article but you will probably find a lot of resources to help you build your admin panels and internal tooling.

Now let's see some of the cons:

• Lack of new features: even though Active Admin development is somewhat active and features are being added. The pace of development is not as fast as it could be. This doesn't mean it's not a good choice per-se but it can be a problem if it doesn't fit your needs in its current form.

• Hard to customize: when starting out, Active Admin can be a godsend for your application but, over time, you will find that you will be writing more and more DSL code to do simple customizations. At some point in time, you will probably struggle with the library to make the admin panel behave and look as you wish.

• An outdated UI: even if internal tooling gets the least design love, nowadays user expect interfaces to be clean, organized and easy to use. Sadly, Active Admin doesn't provide a UI that's up to date with those needs. It's definitely one of its weak points and it can make your admin experience not as pleasant as it could be.

• Poor documentation: having been around for so long, Active Admin is not well documented as it could be, at least not officially. You can probably find a lot of resources about Active Admin but most of them won't be up to date or as complete as you could wish.

If you're looking for a Rails Admin alternative or an Active Admin alternative, you should consider Avo.

We're aware that Rails Admin and Active Admin have been around for a long time and we totally respect what they've accomplished for the Rails ecosystem.

However, we believe that Avo is an improvement over both alternatives.

We know, we are biased: after all, we have more knowledge about the tool we build everyday but that doesn't mean that we cannot be convinced about the benefits it has.

But let's take a look at what make Avo unique and why we believe it's a better alternative for your admin framework needs:

If you're looking for an admin panel framework to use for your next project, you should consider Avo.

We're aware that Rails Admin and Active Admin have been around for a long time and we totally respect what they've accomplished for the Rails ecosystem.

However, we believe that Avo is an improvement over both Avo alternatives.

We know, we are biased: after all, we have more knowledge about the tool we build everyday but that doesn't mean that we cannot be convinced about the benefits it has.

But let's take a look at what make Avo unique and why we believe it's a better alternative for your admin framework needs:

Avo has been around since 2020 and it has a lot of features that can make your life easier as a Rails developer.

Here are some of them:

• A vast variety of fields: Avo comes packed with most of the fields you're going to need in your application without the need to write any code or use third party plugins: text, WYSIWYG textareas with Trix or Tip Tap, password, number, boolean, datetime, taglist, enum, file, image, sound, video, etc. Also, if you get to the point where Avo's fields are not enough, you can easily create your own custom fields.

• Excellent documentation: Avo's documentation is one of our top priorites. We put a lot of effort into documenting the library, especially considering that we have a very tight release cycle. With our documentation you will find everything you need quickly and without the need to go through third party resources.

• Customization is easy: we know that customizing your admin panel is one of the main pain points that developers experience when using admin frameworks. That's why we've built Avo with customization as a first class citizen. We provide a lot of what we like to call "escape hatches" so you can customize your admin panel and not feel like you're fighting against it.

• Active development: we are constantly working on Avo taking customer feedback into consideration and improving our product every day to make it better for you and other Rails developers.

• Development speed through sensible defaults: Avo comes with sensible defaults to make you more productive. We have built tons of admin panels and internal tooling so we can translate that experience into creating a seamless admin experience for Rails developers.

• Current Rails best practices: Avo uses Hotwire and Stimulus to bring a highly interactive experience to the table without the need to write boatloads of front-end code.

• Most common admin features out of the box: It doesn't matter if this is your first or n-th admin panel. Avo can help you build solutions way faster than other alternatives by providing you with the right features at the right time.

• Minimal configuration to achieve what you want: we let you customize your admin panel but don't require extenous amount of configuration to do so.

We know that Avo being a paid product might make you reconsider or even deter you from even trying it.

However, you should know that Avo has a very generous free tier that you can use to build your next awesome application without the need to pay for it.

Also Avo being a paid product means that we can dedicate our time to making it a better product every day so you can focus on your application instead of worrying if we will be around for the next version or if your feature requests are going to be considered at all.

But even if you don't pay for Avo you can still enjoy it because around 70% of our features are present in the community tier.

Feel free to Try Avo and see for yourself how it can help you build faster and better using Rails.