Admin Interfaces for Rails Apps: RailsAdmin vs ActiveAdmin

Just to put a counterpoint out there: My experience is that apps built on top of taller stacks tend to have more maintenance issues. This is because there are more moving pieces under you, and at any moment one of those pieces could cease to be maintained, start working at cross purposes to where you want to take your app, or turn out to be unacceptably inefficient. Having done it both ways, I now prefer to build as much of my app using libraries that I trust and code we write ourselves, rather than use plugins or builders. It's much easier to optimize and maintain in the long run, and a lot of it is easier to write than you may think (especially if you are not trying to solve for the general case). Also, it makes it easier to keep up to date with rails.<p>If you are rapidly developing a prototype it's different, but IMHO you should replace these components before the refactor becomes too much of a bugbear.

I'm genuinely curious to know what is the sweet spot for these admin interfaces and Hobo for that matter?<p>I find prototyping plenty fast with vanilla Rails, a few backend plugins, and Twitter Bootstrap. And on the far end of the scale, my experience is that larger projects require an amount of customization that does not easily fit into the auto-admin paradigm.

I haven't used RailsAdmin yet, but from your analysis, I would feel hesitant to suggest people start of with it.<p>I found working with ActiveAdmin to be very straightforward, and it sounds like getting the equivalent of RailsAdmin up and running may take an extra 30 minutes.<p>The big win after those 30 minutes is that you have a flexible admin module that you can continue to tweak / improve where necessary.<p>ActiveAdmin feels like the solution with the smallest chance of painting yourself into a corner and therefore seems like the best recommendation of the both.<p>Even if you would have to invest 2 extra days into ActiveAdmin compared to RailsAdmin, I'd say the flexibility is definitely worth it.<p>Bonus tip: ActiveAdmin is in heavy development, and the documentation tends to lag behind a bit. I've found the github issues for the project to be a great source of information though.

I'm a big fan of Hobo (<a href="http://hobocentral.net" rel="nofollow">http://hobocentral.net</a>).<p>Disclaimer: I'm one of the maintainers of Hobo. But I got into that position after I fell in love with it.<p>Hobo isn't primarily an admin interface, it's designed for rapid development of CRUD+state machine apps. In essence you start your app with an "admin" style interface and iterate until you get your full app. You can of course also add an additional scoped admin interface.

Another thing to keep in mind is the use case for RailsAdmin - it is pretty much an automatic backend, that you’re not supposed to modify a lot. In its spirit it’s very close to what Django’s admin backend is."<p>I can only reason that the author has never spent more than a few minutes with django's admin.

As developer of Typus I've followed the development of RailsAdmin and ActiveAdmin and I'm very impressed on how they have positioned the product into the market. Many of the customization problems people find with RailsAdmin and ActiveAdmin, are those who I've tried to solve during the last 5 years while developing Typus, and with people feedback.<p>Last version of Typus is fully compatible with Rails 3.1 and there are also branches compatibles with Rails 2.3 and 3.0, MIT-License, bla bla bla ...<p>Documents: <a href="http://docs.typuscmf.com/" rel="nofollow">http://docs.typuscmf.com/</a><p>Demo: <a href="http://demo.typuscmf.com/" rel="nofollow">http://demo.typuscmf.com/</a><p>Code: <a href="http://github.com/fesplugas/typus" rel="nofollow">http://github.com/fesplugas/typus</a>

ActiveScaffold is the mother of CRUD interfaces. Strange thing is that few know and use it. None of the alternatives compares to it in terms of: instant gratification (usable by default), customization (fully customizable), interoperability (bridges for many major plugins like Devise, CanCan, CarrierWave, Paperclip, and many more). Has some legacy issues being ~ 4 years old - but of little concern. Rails 3.1 ready. <a href="https://github.com/activescaffold/active_scaffold" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/activescaffold/active_scaffold</a>

I am also a huge Hobo devotee. I have been in Rails for about 5 years, and Hobo provides amazing leverage and power. It lets you think more about users and less about conventional code worries.

I'm using Refinery, and I'm liking it a lot. It's more in the direction of a CMS though.