ActiveAdmin vs ToolJet

ActiveAdmin (downloaded over 15 million times) is a popular gem used by Ruby on Rails developers to build admin panels for RoR applications. ActiveAdmin has many alternative like RailsAdmin, Administrate, Avo, etc. Many of these tools are tightly integrated with ActiveRecord pattern.

Tools like ActiveAdmin made sense at a time when most of the apps were monoliths and were only using a single database as the datasource. These days, most of the software products store data in multiple sources. For example, the customer credentials might be stored in a PostgreSQL/MySQL database, searchable data might be stored in Elasticsearch, some of the teams might be using Google sheets to store data. Some data might be even stored with third-party services such as Segment, Stripe, Intercom, Google Analytics, Mixpanel, etc. Companies should switch to frameworks/platforms that can easily connect to multiple datasources to fetch, merge, visualize and modify the data.

Why ToolJet?

• Support for multiple databases and integrations such as Airtable, Google sheets, Slack, Stripe and more.
• Inbuilt widgets for charts, tables, maps, forms and more. You can add these widgets to your application using our drag and drop app builder.
• Customizing the looks of an ActiveAdmin dashboard required significant engineering effort. ToolJet widgets can be easily customised using the app builder.
• Easy to install - ToolJet can be deployed to Heroku using the 1-click deployment button. ( https://docs.tooljet.io/docs/setup/heroku ). It takes only 5-10 minutes to deploy and requires only a few environment variables as the input.
• No-code platform - ToolJet can build applications with zero coding. Adding a new page to ActiveAdmin required coding.
• Flexibility - ToolJet doesn't enforce any conventions, it's equally easy to connect to databases managed by frameworks such as Ruby on Rails or Django or Laravel.
• Hosted solution of ToolJet ( ToolJet cloud ) allows you to quickly get started with building internal tools. You don't have to worry about installation, deployment or scaling. The basic plan of ToolJet is absolutely free.

Our mission at ToolJet is to build the low-code platform that can rapidly build customer internal tools. We are actively working on adding more integrations and widgets so that the process of building custom internal tools become time-efficient and fun.