Bubble.Io Review: Pricing, Features And Limitations

What is Bubble?

Bubble is a visual web development platform that allows users to create web applications without having to write traditional code. It falls into the category of no-code or low-code development platforms, which are designed to make application development more accessible to individuals without extensive programming experience.

Bubble is particularly popular among entrepreneurs, startups, and small businesses looking to quickly prototype and develop web applications without the time and resource investment typically associated with traditional coding. It enables users to create functional and visually appealing applications through an intuitive and user-friendly interface.

Bubble.io offers an easy-to-use drag and drop interface, allowing you to build user interfaces quickly and easily. You can create beautiful and interactive websites without writing a single line of code. This is very useful for people who do not have programming skills, but want to create high-quality web applications.

One of bubble.io’s strengths is its ability to integrate data and handle complex logic. You can create applications that are capable of storing and querying data, performing complex calculations, and processing logic as per your requirements. This helps you build diverse and powerful applications without having to write code from scratch.

Bubble pricing

Bubble offers reasonable pricing considering the array of features it provides. However, if your application requires substantial storage, you may need to use an external database to avoid high storage fees associated with Bubble. As of now, the free live option is no longer available due to an increase in fraud, and the starting cost for a lean start-up is $29 per month.

Bubble.io is available at 4 different pricing plans:

• free $0/month

which offers an excellent opportunity to explore the platform (with limited functionalities) and build your app without any cost.

• Starter $32/month (or $29/month for one-year subscription)

A basic plan ideal for testing your project or minimum viable product and for apps with small-to-medium user bases.

• growth $134/month  (or $119/month for one-year subscription)

For projects that involve a little more development and more complex functionalities

• team $399/month  (or $349/month for one-year subscription)

For large projects with high workloads.

Additionally, Bubble.io provides a custom plan tailored to suit the needs of projects that involve sensitive data or require specialized support. For more information about this plan and its pricing, you can directly contact their team.

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How difficult is Bubble to learn?

Generally – pretty easy. Setting up your app design and attaching workflows to elements like buttons and input fields is fairly straightforward, making it possible to set up an MVP in the span of a couple of months and faster as you become more experienced. Bubble has invested a lot of resources over the last few years creating a documentation section that helps new users learn the platform, and there’s also a rich ecosystem of courses, boot camps and coaches online.

Bubble’s marketing is focused on ease of use and brands itself as the tool that basically lets anyone build anything fast. While I’m not going to say that’s not true, I think it’s useful to bring a more balanced perspective on it. I’ve seen a lot of new users learning the platform over the years, and the optimism concerning the time frame in which they assume they will get their app to launch is not always helpful.

It will take time – weeks – to learn the basics, and it will take plenty of time – years – to become a great Bubble developer. The phrase easy to learn, hard to master does apply in Bubble’s case. In short, the complexity of your app needs to match your experience level. While it’s perfectly possible to set up a basic working MVP with no experience at all, a more ambitious project will require more experience to build efficiently. Inexperienced developers are sometimes not aware of making basic, but serious mistakes like failing to secure the app with privacy rules.

Any kind of experience you bring into it will of course help: being an experienced designer or having a background working with relational databases will make it easier to grasp how Bubble works, and knowing JavaScript in particular will be helpful since Bubble is built on that framework and inherits a lot of its quirks. That doesn’t mean that it’s a prerequisite to know any of these – only that it might make your venture into no-code easier.

I find a lot of the students I talk to in my Bubble coaching sessions expect their app to be finished within the next four weeks, while in reality it can take months to get it to the finish line as they are learning as they build. This shouldn’t scare you away from using Bubble – but give you a realistic view of the time it does take to set up a high-quality app.

In general, I would suggest spending at least two weeks learning the basics before you start building your project at all. The first weeks will be all about learning the ropes and getting into best practices. You’ll find that setting up an app for the first time will be a pretty quick process, but going back and making changes on something that wasn’t set up the right way to begin with can be time consuming. Working on an app that doesn’t have to be perfect is the best way to approach it with a clean canvas and focus on learning, and you can set up as many pages and explore as many methods as you want without having to remove it later.

Most professional agencies will finish an app in about 4-6 weeks,. They’ll bring experience, preset modules and templates, sometimes multiple developers and detailed project plans into the project to finish it within that time frame. As a beginner, expect to spend at least double that.

But then let’s not forget – that is still a very short time frame for a non-developer to create a fully functioning application.

How much more efficient is Bubble?

Naturally, there’s no absolute answer to this: it depends on what the project is and what framework we’re comparing Bubble with. Generally though – it’s very efficient. Compared with traditional development, Bubble can provide the same result roughly 70% cheaper and 80% faster.

Bubble’s plugin ecosystem

No Bubble review would be complete without taking a look at how it can expand its features through user-generated extensions. One of the key strengths that made WordPress a household name in internet tech (currently powering more than 75 million websites) is the way in which you can extend a fairly basic set of features with plugins. Bubble follows the same strategy and offers a plugin store that has grown to house a sizeable number of useful additions to Bubble’s features. You’ll find in many cases that there’s a plugin for that when you share a specific challenge on the forum or Twitter, and an increasing amount of the available plugins are built specifically for Bubble.

That being said, the plugin store is not perfect, and its shortcomings deserve some discussion. A legitimate concern shared by many professional developers is that relying on a plugin for key features in your app means placing your trust in a third-party that sometimes you know very little about.

Will they offer customer support? Will they be updating the plugin to stay compatible with Bubble’s engine as it evolves? Will the developer be around for another year? Two? Five? Many plugin builders of course offer high-quality plugins with thorough documentation and fast support – but the plugin store itself has a limited review system, no statistics on bug reports/fixes, developer communication, compatibility or what external libraries they rely on.

These are real concerns, and enough to push numerous agencies to circumvent plugins completely, opting instead to creating their own or solve it in other ways. The good thing is that Bubble opens up for this in several ways that bring less risk, as we’ll explore below.

What are some advanced features of Bubble?  

Do you remember that you can connect to external APIs and services to retrieve data or perform actions when building a Bubble app? For example, instead of adding separate weather data, you can connect to California’s air pollution API to retrieve the air quality information.

First, obtain an API key from the service you want to connect to. Then, you can create a new API in Bubble using the API connector and add the API endpoint and required parameters. After that, you can retrieve data from the API and display it in your app. For example, you can use “get data from external API” in the element’s property section to retrieve weather information from a weather API and display the current temperature in your app. 😝

If you have finished building your Bubble app and want to launch it, you can deploy the app to a web server or a cloud service. In the paid plans, you can deploy your Bubble app as a live version. When you frequently use the “Preview” mode during your work, you can click the button on the left side of the screen to access the deployment screen. From there, you can deploy the app as a live version.

Additionally, as mentioned above, with Bubble’s data capabilities, it is possible to build complex data-driven apps. For example, if you have a customer order database and want to display a list of the best-selling products, you can use Bubble’s data actions to display only the desired information through filtering, sorting, grouping, and more. You can use the “Search” action to retrieve all customer order-related data, then use “filter” to retrieve only completed orders, “sort by” to sort the data by the number of sales, and group the data by the type of product.

Furthermore, by leveraging Bubble’s workflow features, even more complex applications are possible! For example, let’s say you have a survey form where users can submit feedback. You want to send an email to the user every time they submit the form, but only if they check the “send a copy” checkbox. Using Bubble’s conditional statements, you can check whether the checkbox is checked and only send the email if it is.

In addition, in the backend workflow, it is possible to perform repetitive actions such as “execute every X seconds.” Using this feature, it is possible, for example, to check for new messages in a chat app every 10 seconds.

Finally, with Bubble’s “custom event trigger,” you can also set your own conditions. For example, you can set up a complex logic structure that redirects users to a dashboard and logs them in when they click on a message.

Features

Here’s what we’ve learned about some of Bubble’s features. If we summarize Bubble’s characteristics compared to other no-code tools, what are some of the key points?

High Degree of Freedom

Bubble provides many customizable options for users, including workflows, data structure design, and a variety of visual programming tools. This allows developers to create more advanced apps and have greater control over their own apps. Other no-code tools are easier to use, but have greater limitations when it comes to customizing apps.

Complexity

Bubble can be more complex compared to other no-code tools due to the many features and customizable options it provides. However, becoming familiar with Bubble can allow users to design apps with advanced features and greater flexibility. On the other hand, it can take longer to learn and master than other no-code tools. Some of the author’s acquaintances have found Bubble to be too difficult, and have opted to learn React or Python instead within the same timeframe.

Scalability

Bubble is designed with cloud-based infrastructure to handle larger and more complex apps, making it more suitable for individuals and businesses who may need to expand their apps over time.

Cost

Bubble offers a range of plans, from a free plan for small projects to an enterprise plan for large businesses. It is also relatively inexpensive compared to other no-code tools. Although even with the free plan, it can be disappointing to know that users have to pay per app instead of per account.

Steep Learning Curve

As mentioned, Bubble generally has a steeper learning curve compared to other no-code tools due to its many features and high degree of freedom. However, Bubble provides a variety of educational resources, including tutorials and community support, to help users overcome these challenges. Compared to other no-code tools, it provides much more resources for learning and development.

Community Support

Bubble has a developer community that provides support and resources for building and expanding apps. This includes forums, webinars, and other resources that can help users solve problems and learn new skills.

Bubble is a no-code tool that provides various functions and customizable options. It has a steep learning curve and appears to be more developer-oriented as it offers high tool flexibility, making it recommended for those who want to create more sophisticated apps. If you are considering using Bubble or other no-code tools, I hope you judge the practical benefits of each tool depending on your app building purpose.

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Pros and Cons