Trestle Admin Alternative: how does Avo compare to Trestle?

Yes, we are biased. After all, we build Avo everyday for a community of passionate users and customers.

We believe Avo is the best admin framework for Rails applications. However, here's an honest answer:

Trestle Admin and Avo are admin frameworks built on top of Ruby on Rails that have the same goal: help you build admin experiences faster and better.

Both options do it by replacing the repetitive and time-consuming tasks with a better alternative: an admin panel based on your application resources that's able to generate itself from a DSL

But, both tools have strengths and weaknesses and we believe that Avo is a better option to build an admin panel using Rails.

So let's start by analyzing Trestle and what are it's pros and cons:

Trestle is one of the solutions to create admin panels and internal tooling for the Rails ecosystem.

First released in 2017, it lets you build admin experiences using a DSL that's configurable on a per-resource basis. Its 2024 Hotwire release modernized the front end onto Turbo and Stimulus and moved it to Bootstrap 5, so if you know Rails it feels current.

Its features are suited to help build your application's admin by installing the library and creating a couple of Trestle resources (that correspond to resources in your application) from the command line or adding them by hand.

From there, Trestle generates the views for you to CRUD your resources and you can customize them using the resource file using a DSL like you would with Active Admin or Avo itself.

But Trestle comes with some downsides too, so lets explore the pros and the cons:

• Quickly build an admin panel: Trestle allows you to build admin panels and internal tooling using Rails and a DSL to customize your experience.

• Own and be responsible for your data: Trestle hooks into your Rails application and doesn't require your data to be hosted by a third-party like some options do.

• Friendly, modern interface: Trestle's user interface is definitely a step up from more established solutions like Active Admin or Rails Admin. It's clean and, since the Hotwire release, runs on a modern Turbo and Stimulus front end.

• You outgrow it, then you build the rest yourself: Trestle covers the CRUD screens most admins need on day one. But as your internal tooling grows, the capabilities you reach for next are the ones you'd have to build by hand or hunt for a plugin. In Avo those are first-party, supported add-ons you switch on: Dynamic Filters for the search-and-filter combinations power users expect, Dashboards for real-time metrics and charts, Record Reordering for drag-and-drop priority lists, Kanban boards for order and content pipelines, and Nested Records for editing associated records right inside the parent form.

• Documentation is thin: Trestle's documentation is not its strong suit. Most of it lives in the project's GitHub wiki, so when you hit an edge case you're often reading source or issues, while Avo documents every feature on a dedicated, versioned docs site.

• Ease of customization: While Trestle provides some customization options (views, fields, actions and helpers) Avo provides more personalization options and "escape hatches" that allow you to build your admin panel as you wish. However, Trestle does offer a better customization experience than other, more established, options like Active Admin.

• Slow release cadence and a small bus factor: This is the reason most people go looking for a Trestle alternative. The last release, v0.10.1, shipped in September 2024, and after roughly nine years the project is still pre-1.0 and driven largely by a single maintainer. For a piece of infrastructure with the keys to your data, that's a real risk: fixes and Rails-version support arrive when one person has time, and there's no roadmap you can plan around.

We believe that, in the long run, you will be more productive with Avo than with Trestle.

Even though at first you might feel that your productivity is similar using either one, with time it will become clear that Avo is a superior alternative and that it gives you the tools you need to save time and money.

Avo provides more features out of the box and it allows you to customize your experience seamlessly as soon as the need becomes apparent.

It's not only about the fact that Avo is more customizable by design but also by the fact that it's well documented. Avo provides multiple "escape hatches" that allow you to customize your experience by ejecting from things like views, fields, partials, components, and much more.

Avo is also an actively maintained project and is constantly improving. Plus, it has a vibrant community and a healthy amount of paying customers that bring the development forward.

You're probably wondering why would anyone pay for an admin framework like Avo if there are other alternatives like Administrate, Rails Admin or Motor Admin right?

Well, first of all: Avo is a paid product, but it has a generous free Community tier that covers a large share of what you need, especially when you're getting a project off the ground. And the paid plans are priced per app with unlimited users, so growing your team never grows the bill.

You can absolutely start building your product with it and switch to our paid plans whenever you feel they can improve your development flow.

Also, Avo being a paid product is actually what allows us to improve it and make it better for paying users and free users alike.

Actually, the amount of money you can save from the productivity gains that Avo gives you is just a fraction of what you pay for any of our licenses.

Even if you build on top of existing Rails admin frameworks, Avo saves you a lot of time to let you focus on adding value to your product instead of writing yet another select component or search feature.

But don't take our word on it, give Avo a try by checking our demo application or installing it for your next project and see for yourself how it can positively affect your development flow.