Rails Admin vs. ActiveAdmin [closed]

Asked 30/6, 2011 at 23:8 Answered 25/10, 2011 at 9:45

Solved ruby-on-rails ruby ruby-on-rails-3 activeadmin ruby-on-rails-plugins

I've been looking into some rails admin plugins and came across these:

https://github.com/gregbell/active_admin

https://github.com/sferik/rails_admin

https://github.com/thoughtbot/administrate (EDIT: added later)

Any suggestions as to which one to go with. I would need it to support model associations and file uploads abilities.

Buseck answered 30/6, 2011 at 23:8 Comment(4)

I have also tried both gems, but cost me a lot of work to customize them. I am now using admin_interface, try it, maybe it is you are looking for. – Cardin 14/3, 2012 at 12:27

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 AA - batsov.com/articles/2011/11/20/… – Avon 14/3, 2012 at 15:15

This was a very constructive question and set of answers. Really appreciated thoughts from both sides. Sad to see so many useful questions such as this closed. – Brena 7/9, 2012 at 18:7

To expand on Bozhidar's answer above, have a long think about how customised you imagine your admin area to be. I've wasted almost a week of work and had to scrap my rails_admin section because creating custom controllers, actions, and views is grueling. I've since moved over to active_admin and have much more control! Don't make a similar mistake. – Balakirev 21/3, 2013 at 14:38

I vote for rails_admin. I like its looks and the fact that out of the box all the models are available for administration. The history feature is quite useful too.

Any project with Yehuda Katz as a mentor should be a safe bet.

Theis answered 1/7, 2011 at 1:29 Comment(1)

Are there some feature comparisons available somewhere? Looks and default behavior matter less to me than what it supports with not too much work... – Exaltation 31/10, 2011 at 17:38

I personally think the two could be merged, and have just raised the issue on both projects:

I think it would be great to take the best parts from both, and collaborate on the missing pieces.

Selinaselinda answered 25/10, 2011 at 9:45 Comment(3)

This is not a good idea at all. Those admins are serving different purposes. Did you try both of them for real projects? – Civics 20/1, 2012 at 10:57

I understand now that RailsAdmin is an automatic admin UI, while ActiveAdmin is an admin scaffold. I love ActiveAdmin's flexibility because of this approach, but it's missing RailsAdmin's model and association detection, and the awesome automatic forms. So I would be really happy if RailsAdmin was merged into ActiveAdmin to produce an extensible, yet automatic-by-default interface. – Selinaselinda 29/11, 2012 at 7:27

Good thinking. I agree! – Kagoshima 19/4, 2013 at 5:23

I think it's really a matter of personal preference. More people are using rails_admin[*], but I prefer active_admin.

The reasons I chose ActiveAdmin were predominantly that it was developed with assumptions that I would make myself: using gems like devise and inherited_resources, and using a nice form builder (formtastic, though I would have chosen simple_form).

I actually prefer that not all models are exposed to the admin by default, though rails_admin supports that with 'config.included_models'.

[*] Watches/forks on https://github.com/gregbell/active_admin vs https://github.com/sferik/rails_admin - though the gap is closing.

Billie answered 23/9, 2011 at 15:3 Comment(4)

I don't like it exacly for that reason. It only works with old version of the gems: s.add_dependency("formtastic", "< 2.0.0") s.add_dependency("inherited_resources", "< 1.3.0") – Fishy 4/10, 2011 at 13:34

That's no longer the case with Formtastic - see github.com/gregbell/active_admin/blob/master/… "formtastic", ">= 2.0.0" Inherited resources is still < 1.3.0, sadly. This probably isn't terribly difficult to change and make a pull request, though. – Billie 17/10, 2011 at 14:0

Oh, nice! ActiveAdmin is just about even with RailsAdmin on github. Watchers/forks: 2474/505 - 2767/557. – Billie 8/2, 2012 at 18:49

The most important disadvantage of ActiveAdmin is nota bene Formtastic. In some of my apps I used simple_form and it's nearly impossible to get them work along when you have custom inputs. – Heraclitus 13/2, 2013 at 8:11

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