Startup and business owners often worry that using the no-code tool Bubble to build a web app might limit customization, flexibility, and scalability.
They worry that Bubble.io won't adapt well to their specific needs or handle growth and complex functions as effectively as traditional coding, potentially causing issues in development and hindering performance as the business grows.
These are legitimate concerns. No one wants to hit a point where their platform's capabilities fall short of their requirements. But what makes Bubble.io unique among other no-code platforms is its extensive customization options that allow users to tailor their web apps to their exact specifications. Unlike other no-code tools that focus on specific use cases (e.g., Shopify for e-commerce) or parts of the tech stack (e.g., Airtable for databases), Bubble offers a true alternative to custom code.
To show what you can do with Bubble (and what you can’t), we'll cover the following:
What is Bubble.io?
Bubble is a programming tool and cloud platform that enables anyone to quickly build their web applications visually without code.
It’s designed to help you build software and applications using graphics and images to express computing logic, rather than relying solely on text-based representation (i.e. coding). It specializes in responsive web and mobile apps with dynamic databases and complex functionality. Bubble users retain the full intellectual property of their application (design, workflows and data), while Bubble retains the IP of the non-app-specific engine.
Bubble pros and cons: What can you do with Bubble.io?
If you're thinking about building a custom Bubble web app for your startup or business, it's a good idea to understand what it can and cannot do. The list below outlines Bubble’s capabilities, features, user capacity, and more so you can see if it’s customizable and scalable enough for your project.
Design
Pros:
- Pixel-perfect design (vs. fixed templates): The Bubble platform does pixel perfect design, as opposed to fixed templates. This means you can do a fully custom design without hitting limitations.
- Pro: Responsive design (vs. fixed width): Bubble's pages are responsive. In other words, they will adjust automatically to the width of whatever device they're seen on. Additionally, you can customize the elements on your page, deciding what collapses, what hides, and when to show something different on mobile devices.
Things to be aware of:
- Importing design: While you can technically import graphics and user interface designs from tools like Figma on Bubble, it’s pretty rudimentary. Expect to mainly develop the designs from scratch within the interface.
Functionality
Pros:
- Fully customizable step-by-step process flows (vs. templated actions or limited things like links): The Bubble platform gives you full customization of every step in a series of actions, as opposed to some other tools which will only offer preset actions.
- Broad coding functionality (vs. use case-specific): The no-code Bubble app builder editor is open-ended, and like a traditional programming language, there's no fixed set of possibilities to the type of product you can build. This means you don’t have to work within the rails of a specific use-case.
- Artificial intelligence (AI): Bubble makes it simple to link with AI tools like ChatGPT and DALL-E, enabling you to create novel and powerful apps. Learn how to integrate AI into your Bubble app.
Databases
Pros:
- Custom relational databases (vs. simple CMS or static content): Bubble allows you to create a totally customized database structure and have users on your application interact with that database in any way you want. For example, users can change things in the database themselves, as opposed to you having to do it for them in the administrator section.
- Integrating with external databases: Bubble editor provides a tool, the SQL Database Connector, that allows developers to connect applications to external and internal databases and run SQL queries from within Bubble.
Integrations
Pros:
- Integrating with 3rd party services: Bubble connects to any kind of external services that expose an API (including payments, sources of data, authentication providers, etc.). Additionally, it is fully extensible via Javascript plugins. You can create your own plugins to add connections to non-supported services, add elements written in Javascript, or write server code. See more on using Bubble's API connector here.
- User sign-ins using OAuth: Bubble allows you to use some external services to authenticate users using their credentials from another service, such as Facebook or Google. It also allows for single sign-on from something like your own internal enterprise login. This is all done through plugins.
Custom code
Pros:
- Ability to add custom code: The Bubble platform allows you to extend your app’s capabilities with traditional lines of code. If you come across a limitation, such as doing an AI algorithm, developers can integrate custom code to extend the app.
- Languages supported: For basic look-and-feel you can add HTML and CSS, and for more complex functionality you can add JavaScript to any Bubble app.
Performance/Scalability (how many users can Bubble handle?)
Pros:
- Max scale (500k+ daily users): Bubble.io is continuously making pushes to provide scalability. Bubble apps scale automatically, and when they reach a certain scale, they can migrate to a Dedicated Cluster that isolates them completely from the main user base, and gives a lot of headroom when traffic goes up. For example, some no-code Bubble apps handle more than 500k page views daily on such configuration. Apps on the main cluster currently reach more than 30m page views monthly.
Things to be aware of:
- If you expect to eventually service millions of daily active users, Bubble is still a good option to launch your app quickly and plan a transition to a traditionally coded tech stack where you can optimize and configure every aspect of your app to perform at this scale.
Lock-In
Pros:
- Ability to export data: With the Bubble platform, you can always download all of your data and put it into a different system, or use an API to connect it to something else. Your data is very easily portable, meaning you won’t get trapped there.
Things to be aware of:
- Ability to export code: There is no "export to code" button with Bubble – the app logic is hosted within their platform. However, you can integrate the software with external databases and APIs either in the initial build, or as part of a transition to another tech stack.
How is Bubble planning to boost its capacity and features?
In October 2023, Bubble announced their product roadmap and the new ways they’re focused on increasing the scalability, performance, and innovation of the platform even further. Below is a quick list of the roadmap updates they’re working on:
- A true native mobile app builder (not wrapped native apps) with publishing to Apple and Android stores (expected mid-2024)
- AI-powered design, so users can begin full-fledged web apps from scratch just by describing what they want and having it appear on the canvas (expected mid-2024)
- New, more powerful bulk data operations to make data processing at scale faster and more efficient. These new bulk operations will allow Bubble users to make bigger data transformations without recursive workflows (expected mid-2024)
- A revamped expression composer to make building on Bubble even more flexible and easy to use with simpler editing, automatic parentheses, and better keyboard controls (expected early 2024)
- Returning data from custom events to allow for more modular, easy-to-organize workflow structures. Soon, users will be able to add one or more fields to each custom event indicating the names and types of data it can return (expected early 2024)
Want examples of no-code Bubble apps?
Check out custom Bubble.io examples that we’ve built for clients to see what’s possible (and how they’ve scaled over time). Or, learn more about our Bubble development services if you’re ready to start building your own app fast and reliably.
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