The Good and Bad of Bubble.io
Recently, I’ve been looking into the wider world of web development other than the traditional web building methods of HTML, CSS, and Javascript. I wasn’t too shocked to find that there are actually a lot of alternatives to building web apps other than the more traditional methods. I decided to do a bit more digging into a few of them. Many of you may be familiar with some of the more well-known CMS platforms such as WordPress, but one in particular that caught my eye was Bubble.io.
Bubble.io describes itself as a “drag and drop” editor which allows you to build websites without code. Ok, that’s all fine and dandy, but how well do they live up to that promise? After about a week of playing around with Bubble, I can tell you that there are definitely applications you can build with Bubble which would take way less time than actually coding it, but for more advanced projects, I’m still going to stick with traditional coding — at least for now. Here’s why.
What Bubble.io Does Well
The part where they say you can drag and drop elements is true. When you create a Bubble.io account, you’re led to their main dashboard which is a blank screen with a toolbar on the left. From there you can select elements such as text, input fields, shapes, and many other things. I followed some of Bubble.io’s tutorials and built a fully functioning sign-up and login feature that had validations and saved user data to a database in about four minutes. That’s not a joke. What would normally take me at least a day of setting up a backend and frontend to save user’s data took me four minutes. I was shook. To do that, I just dragged and dropped input fields just like they told me. Then you have to set up the inputs to Bubble’s backend which is pretty straightforward. Bubble, to me at least, follows a Javascript pattern of taking the input’s value and matching that with a piece of data in the backend. I was very impressed by how easy it was to save data. The form doesn’t look that bad either and was fully responsive.
What Bubble.io Doesn’t Do So Well
A problem I saw with Bubble was your ability to customize. Because much of the code is premade, you kind of have to rely on Bubble’s styles for a lot of the apps you want to build. There are ways to customize and Bubble provides plugins from third-party APIs that you can use, but for the most part, I can see someone that wants a highly customized app having problems. Other negatives I found were having to pay for more advanced usage of Bubble’s plugins. There are also a limited number of plugins, which could hinder specific apps.
Conclusion
If you want to build a simple application that may just display information or have a limited UI, Bubble.io seems like a good option for that. It’s fairly intuitive and the tutorials Bubble provides are really worthwhile. Having prior knowledge of coding in frontend languages is helpful as you can quickly figure out what Bubble is doing in terms of handling events. If you’re building a larger, more complex application or one that you need to be highly customizable, I personally wouldn’t use Bubble, but in the future, I may change my mind. Let me know in the comments if you’ve used Bubble and what your thoughts are!
