Rails Admin vs. ActiveAdmin

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

21,733

Solution 1

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.

Solution 2

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.

Solution 3

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.

21,733

Author by

erickreutz

Programmer, designer, maker, student http://3dro.ps

Updated on June 23, 2020

Comments

erickreutz almost 4 years

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.
montrealmike over 12 years

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")
Michael Hellein over 12 years

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.
084m4_Pri5m over 12 years

Are there some feature comparisons available somewhere? Looks and default behavior matter less to me than what it supports with not too much work...
fro_oo over 12 years

This is not a good idea at all. Those admins are serving different purposes. Did you try both of them for real projects?
Michael Hellein about 12 years

Oh, nice! ActiveAdmin is just about even with RailsAdmin on github. Watchers/forks: 2474/505 - 2767/557.
ndbroadbent over 11 years

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.
Hauleth about 11 years

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.
Abram about 11 years

Good thinking. I agree!