What most comfortable and useful: ActiveAdmin or Rails Admin?

Question

So, what most comfortable and useful for developer? A similar question was already 4 years ago, and many things could change.

http://activeadmin.info/

https://github.com/sferik/rails_admin

or maybe Typus https://github.com/typus/typus???

Answer 1

Disclaimer: this is only opinion. This kind of question can have no 'correct' answer.

I use Rails Admin a lot on my current main project. It has advantages and disadvantages.

Advantages:

• It handles things like nested forms for ActiveRecord relationships out of the box.

Disadvantages:

• Adding features or custom behaviour is quite difficult and documentation is over-complex and fragmented.
• Putting the DSL for CMS behaviour in the models is not great for code separation.
• The default style is a little outdated.
• The DSL itself is over-complex, badly documented and prone to code bloat and duplication.
• The use of PJAX for page updates can complicate any JS you wish to add to the page. (If you're not careful your code will be run multiple times, or not at all, for a single page.)
• The default mechanism for saving content items is incompatible with a database that uses referential integrity. This is a very bad thing. (I ended up patching this code.)

I haven't used ActiveAdmin as much, but when I have I noticed the following things:

• Out-of-the-box, you have to roll more of your own features when it comes to things like nested forms for relationships. (This may have changed over time.)
• It looks lovely.
• The DSL is neatly separated from the model code and feels more logical.
• Adding your own features is a lot easier with less code.
• Adding JS is pretty trivial.

I don't know if Active Admin is better for referential integrity, but if this interests you let me know in comments and I'll set up a couple of trial projects to show you what I mean.