ActiveAdmin Alternatives [closed]

Question

I have been using the pretty looking active admin recently and ran in to some issues happening across my application with a performance issue and other things including the taking over of the clean and nice "search" keyword used by the Sunspot gem (like Model.search) which is replaced by the meta_search.

So I am now unhappy with ActiveAdmin and would like to see if there are some nice alternatives out there that can give a good administration framework as well as give the ability to browse data, since I will be deploying on heroku and browsing the database directly there without something like active_admin is not that simple.

Any suggestions or pointers to admin frameworks will be much appreciated

Answer 1

I can think of:

• RailsAdmin: supported by rails-core
• Typus: seems very powerful

I also found an (older) article doing a comparison of the three.

[EDIT: update March 2018]

The above seem still relevant, but there are new some new kids on the block:

• trestle seems very promising imho: clean, responsive, modern (my current fav!)
• administrate built by thoughtbot, and aims to improve upon rails-admin and active-admin by simplifying it actually (e.g. no DSL's). Interesting approach

To my surprise I noticed that the first gem I used for this purpose is still actively being developed: activescaffold

Also for future reference check the ruby-toolbox's relevant category .

Answer 2

Have a look at RailsAdmin. Here's a quick comparison of the two - RailsAdmin and ActiveAdmin serve different purposes - RailsAdmin is intended to provide an admin UI that usable out-of-the-box with little or no manual tweaking, whereas ActiveAdmin is more or less a scaffold (or a framework) for building admin interfaces. Generally you can build more flexible UIs with ActiveAdmin, but this require more effort on your part. My suggestion to Rails devs is always the same - try out RailsAdmin first and if it's not good enough for you develop a custom UI with ActiveAdmin.

I've written a fairly extensive article on the subject. You might want to check it out. The comments of the article mention some other nice options you can consider.