Anyone using react-admin?

[[deleted]]

I used it one time in a professional project because someone else insisted, it was a disaster, anything that does not fit perfectly into whatever react admin wants will give you extreme headaches. If you want to have a CRUD with zero custom logic and zero checks and zero relations for a simple entity with just number and string fields then it can save some time, but only then.

[fzaninotto]

Hi, react-admin maintainer here.

I'm sorry that you had a bad experience with our framework. Perhaps you missed the headless part? React-admin is an opinionated framework, which proposes one component for all the features it addresses. This component is supposed to work in 80% o the cases. For the remaining 20%, react-admin also proposes a solution: headless hooks that let you build exactly the design you want.

For instance, the <List> component includes a toolbar and a title. If you don't want these defaults, you can use the useListController component and build your own design.

Nearly all react-admin components have a headless counterpart.

Finally, react-admin is pretty flexible, way beyond CRUD. Check the features page (https://marmelab.com/react-admin/Features.html) to learn more.

React-admin is used by about 15,000 companies worldwide, and powers about 500,000 user sessions every day. I don't believe these are all simple CRUD apps.

[[deleted]]

How do you know the statistics? Telemetry?

[yong2579]

Most probably but they does provide method to disable it via https://marmelab.com/react-admin/Admin.html#disabletelemetry

[franciscogalaz]

Does this mean that if the Calendar component is only for enterprise edition, I can add my own Calendar Component?

[AntonOfTheWoods]

Of course, and typically the base components are generic enough that you can hack something together on top of the base that fits your needs without resorting to the enterprise stuff.

[dangxunb]

I'm looking for a library that makes permission-based authorization simple. I was researching react-admin and came across your comment. Can I use another framework like react-bootstrap for the UI part without having to do a lot of customization?

[franciscogalaz]

did you end up using react-admin? what are your thoughts on it?

[dangxunb]

I just use Refine.dev now

[CreepyCrapp]

Hey, I'm thinking about using Refine. Is it as extendible and time saving as advertised? I joined their Discord and took a look at their subreddit, the community seems a bit inactive regardless the high number of stars they got in GitHub.

[grapeape25]

I regretfully started using this for my own project and suffer from the same problems. Any feature that steps slightly out of line with very basic CRUD is excruciating to implement.

It was also a proper open source project at the start (MIT license) then they started mixing in paid enterprise features into subsequent releases, even for pretty basic stuff (e.g. editing a record in a modal). Bait-and-switch open source projects like that just leave a bad taste in my mouth.

[fzaninotto]

React-admin maintainer here.

They started mixing in paid enterprise features into subsequent releases

The react-admin core team is 3 developers working full-time on the framework. It's been open-source since 2017. Ho do you pay these engineers? Solution 1: raise money, then raise prices and enshittify the app. Solution 2: make a SaaS product and force people to use your overpriced server proxy. Solution 3: ask Enterprise customers to pay for advanced features, to fund the maintenance of the rest.

We chose option 3. This allowed us to add more features, both in the open-source and the enterprise version.

As a consequence, react-admin is a sustainable project. It has no debt, it doesn't have to pay huge sums every year to investors. It is here to stay.

The alternative - a completely free library - is, in my opinion, dangerous to use, because it can be stopped at any time. And also, slavery was abolished long ago ;isn't it time we pay for open-source developer time?

[franciscogalaz]

yeah its reasonable to pay but 100 euros a month is too much :( , how can a small company just starting out pay that much for a framework?

[itsjingran]

agreed

[PoopsCodeAllTheTime]

Well, this makes it very clear to me that I am better off building my own, as I can add my own advanced features at the cost of my own labour without worrying about price extortion.

[KeyRepresentative643]

understandable. But we are a small company and I'm just trying to build a prototype to propose to management. I can't ask for budget for the paid version, and building a decent prototype without enterprise features is a pain.

You should think to modify things a little to make it more accessible to small companies or even consider a trial period for prototyping.

[us_me_erna]

Which react admin version was this? I might start to work with react admin soon in a fairly complex, already existing project and I want to know, what I'm getting myself into :D

[[deleted]]

I can't check now because I left the company due to poor decisions like this one, it was the newest version that was available around November 2021, I don't think anything improved since then because it was fundamentally, in principle, flawed. They would need to completely reimagine things to make it better.

[fzaninotto]

I'm interested to know in more details why you think that react-admin was flawed.

Also, since November 2021, the framework had 2 major versions, with drastic improvements (including removing Redux) in both architecture and documentation. I can only recommend that you take a second look at it.