Thinking about switching to UI Bakery - Some questions

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1

Hi everyone!

A client of mine is currently using an internal tool running on Airtable and Noloco and we are considering switching to a low code solution in order to have some more options regarding functionality and UI.
We were looking at retool first but since we currently have 70+ Users and potentially 100-150+ in the future, their pricing structure does not really work for us. UI Bakery looks quite promising so far but there are some things I am not quite sure about. Maybe someone here can give us some more clarity.

These are the things we are wondering:

  • We need a Calender view and a Timeline view. The latter with grouping options (Project timeline → deployments for this projects → Accommodations for each deployment) . As I understand, UI bakery does not provide prebuild Calender/Timeline views. How complicated is it to set these up manually? I was able to create a basic calender with with the AI without having coding experience but it didn’t quite work as I wanted it to. We’d be happy to hire a dev but the time necessary to develop these should be reasonable.
  • Same for a gallery view, though I assume this one would be much easier to do?
  • We currently have ~72k records (after 15 month) across ~80 tables. We were thinking of moving out db from airtable to supabase. Does this work well with UI bakery or would you recommend a different approach?
  • How is the overall responsiveness of UI bakery apps compared to nocode tools like noloco or glide? Is it potentially better or worse?

Would be happy for some input :slight_smile:

Cheers

2

Hi @_4N,

Firstly, there are some things to generally have in mind.

You can build applications with low code, but it really depends on how much customization is needed.
Some actions/components/etc. might have not been natively implemented yet. Those require some effort on the coding side, but the UI Bakery team constantly works on new and improved features, also requested features or integrations from the community.

I’d also say that an adequate amount of coding in JavaScript goes a long way, as you need to set up how the components work with data sources and between one another.

Now to your specific questions:

  • Yes, as you say, UI Bakery does not yet have a Calendar or Timeline component. But it should not be difficult to set up as there are many libraries that do exactly that, so you only need to import and configure them. I’d say if someone knows what they’re doing, it should take at max 1–2 weeks.

    Just as an example, I used the first result on Google for a calendar JavaScript library and in like a couple of minutes I had the calendar ready:

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    image2096Ă—1234 50.7 KB

    Of course, the most amount of time is needed for customization of the imported “components”.

  • A Gallery view, as you say, is even easier to do. There are many many libraries, and they should be set up even faster than the calendar and timeline.

  • Supabase should work perfectly fine. As long the integration for a database is implemented, there are rarely issues using those. Just make sure not to use Supabase’s “Direct Connection”, as that uses IPv6.

  • I have used neither noloco nor glide, but looking at some example apps from both, it seems to be about the same. Glide seems to do it a bit better with the layout shift, but if you set up and configure the components correctly, UI Bakery should do a pretty decent job. Though, the main focus is definitely on desktop.

I hope this clears some things up, feel free to ask further if you have more questions :slight_smile:

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