We love the Bubble Platform.
Really we do.
But, as with most platforms, it has its shortcomings. And as a client, you should probably be aware of these in order to make the best decision for your project.
There are three big areas where it falls down:
1. Performance
Scaling up can be expensive unless great care is taken UP FRONT to optimize the queries and design of the app.
Unfortunately, the ease of use that Bubble provides means that a lot of users simply jump right in without giving any thought to a long-term architecture.
And, at other times, users simply don’t want to pay for the expensive up-front work required to make sure that it’s easy to scale Bubble up.
All of which means that when it’s time to increase capacity, it becomes really expensive, really fast.
2. Code & Lock In
Once you’re in Bubble’s bubble, it’s really hard to get out. There’s no facility for exporting code that’s useful. You have to rebuild EVERYTHING in whatever other platform you’ve chosen.
3. It Can Be Tedious
Because EVERYTHING is graphically driven, many things are just tedious. As an agency, this means that some things that look simple to the client are actually very costly.
Imagine building a CRM that has, say 50 fields that all need workflows to connect to the datastore (‘thing’). It’s a lot of pointing and clicking because there’s no automatic binding.
Graphical UI’s make a lot of no-code easy. But it also increases the amount of time it takes to get many things done. Items that would be copy-and-paste or have ‘generalized’ functions in regular code is needlessly repetitive in the no-code bubble.
Wrap Up
So, as you evaluate Bubble as a platform, you need to keep these shortcomings in mind. If you, as a client, can afford the budget and time to get the up-front design correct, Bubble is a great platform for your MVP and more. But if you just jump right in and ignore all the standard software development best-practices, you might find that the long-run expense and maintenance cost is far far more than you would expect.