While Adalo and Bubble alone are very powerful no-code tools, they both have their disadvantages. In this article, I will show you the advantages and disadvantages of both systems and how to build the perfect app by combining the two no-code tools.
Bubble.io is a very mature system. The company started in 2012 and you really see the years of experience and energy they put into the product. Bubble.io gives you many possibilities to develop complex software applications. Whenever you reach the limit of the no-code editor, you can easily add custom code or build your own plug-ins. The really cool thing about bubble.io compared to other no-code platforms is that you get the all building blocks required for a 3-tier software architecture. That means you get the database, a powerful workflow engine and a visual editor for your interface.
The main purpose of bubble.io however is to develop web applications. Furthermore, you can build responsive applications, PWAs, and also native apps (with some plug-ins). However, it is still more effort to develop native apps compared to other no-code platforms such as Adalo.
Based on my experience, I do see the following advantages:
As Warren Buffet once said, there is no free lunch, Bubble.io also has some disadvantages to notice.
Adalo attracts a different target group with different use cases. Most likely, you want to build a rather simple mobile application with Adalo. For example, e-commerce ordering apps, food delivery apps, chat systems, or other kinds of apps displaying and processing simple information. Adalo is rather new but has a very promising future.
The main focus of Adalo is to build mobile applications. While you can also build web applications, the visual editor is specifically developed for the purpose of mobile applications. It gives you a lot of templates and components which you normally use when developing apps or PWAs. Furthermore, it also comes with an integrated database.
While they offer also some possibility to add custom code or develop your own plug-ins, it can be compared to the richness of bubble.io. Important to note that this might change in the future.
Adalo is still pretty young, therefore the advantages will be further extended in the future.
Due to the newness of Adalo it comes with some disadvantages.
To summarize, Bubble.io is super strong in the backend systems. Furthermore, it requires more effort to build interfaces for mobiles applications. On the other side, Adalo makes it easy to develop the interface for mobile applications. However, it does lack the possibility to create backend workflows for complex apps.
The best way would be to combine the advantages of Adalo and Bubble. This is exactly what we are going to do now ;)
As you have seen in the list of advantages and disadvantages, we want to build an app with the following requirements. First, we need to have complex backend workflows giving us full flexibility. Secondly, we don't want to waste time developing a native app with Bubble.io with the need of adding additional plug-ins with extra costs.
They are many possibilities for how you can integrate Adalo and Bubble. We will cover the following ones in the article:
Depending on the data and the data privacy you want to show, it is very simple to show data from your bubble application in your Adalo mobile apps. Please be aware of your data privacy rules. Check out the very comprehensive tutorial on how you can use bearer tokens to make your bubble data available outside your application.
In the example I created (see YouTube tutorial for a step-by-step) explanation, I developed a food-delivery app. The data for this app however was nearly completely stored in the bubble backend. The main benefit was that I can use the same backend (bubble in this case) for various applications. In this particular case, I had one app for customers and drivers and a web application for admins and restaurant managers. The data however was always in one place and not spread over several applications (which will result in a data nightmare at some point).
They are situations where you want to have the same users, including roles and privileges, in both systems. One example is that users can log in to the Adalo application as well as into the bubble.io applications. By doing that, you clearly want to have the same credentials for an improved customer experience.
Another role is data privacy. I can't mention this enough, as I have seen too many bubble.io applications with bad data privacy implementations. If you apply the data privacy rules correctly, you need to have a user-specific token (bearer token) to make any kind of API requests for your bubble.io application. This sounds complicated and in the beginning, you need to have a solid knowledge of APIs and data privacy rules.
That's why I did a very long but detailed tutorial about that. With that, you can sign up new users in both systems and log them into both systems.
If you were diligent so far, using custom backend workflows in Bubble.io and calling them from your Adalo application is not a problem for you. It is basically exactly the same as what we did when creating new users.
You have to understand the following schema:
Watch the YouTube video about user synchronization. We do use custom backend workflows in this example for creating new users. You can easily copy the schema and use it for your purpose.
When working with custom actions in Adalo you can choose two different ways to create new data objects in Bubble. The first one is to use the data API which is automatically created by bubble.io for CRUD operations (another advantage you never want to miss again). The second is to create custom backend workflows, as we did when creating a new user.
You might ask yourself when to use the data API or the workflow API. As it always depends on the use case, you can think of it in the following ways. If you have simple objects without many variations or relationships with other data objects, you better go with the Data API. However, if you want to create relationships between data objects or check first for feasibility, you are way better off with the workflow API. In this tutorial, I show you both ways.
If you worked all the way through it, you really learned a lot! The main learnings are not only about Adalo or Bubble.io itself but rather on how to work with APIs, bearer tokens, custom backend workflows, and custom actions.
If you are still unsure on when you should make the effort of integrating Adalo and Bubble, you might consider the following list:
Do you still feel unsure or have trouble integrating Adalo and Bubble. We are only one call away and always help to help.
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