First, we'd like to thank Bubble for what they are doing in the no-code space. It's a wonderful tool, with an incredible community of makers who were able to create web applications for the first time thanks to Bubble. That said, if you're here searching for Bubble alternatives, we bet it's because you hit a ceiling with this tool.
In Bubble, you build your whole app inside the tool, from frontend to backend. Meaning, you only use one tool to design the database schema, workflows and the visual part of your web application. This has advantages, most notably: you only need to learn and pay for one tool.
WeWeb, on the other hand, focuses only on the frontend part of web applications. Indeed, you only create the "visual part" of a web app inside our tool. You’ll need an external backend to store user data. This approach has advantages of its own.
Building the backend and frontend on separate technologies allows for finer optimizations of your web application. Let’s say you have many users connected at the same time in your app. You can choose to optimize your database only, when loading times are an issue. Or load only the relevant data in WeWeb to decrease loading times.
In addition, this approach is the building method of choice of many organizations that already have an existing backend or need that flexibility of connecting multiple data sources without compromising page speed and performance.
That’s probably the first reason that has led some Bubble users to try WeWeb: despite big improvements made to Bubble's responsive designer lately, the experience remains clunky.
While it’s hard to create pixel-perfects design in Bubble, it’s a breeze in WeWeb. Indeed, WeWeb is based on the latest web design standards and is nothing more than an HTML and CSS visual editor (with some JavaScript to handle real-time interactivity).
While these technical terms can be intimidating for someone who doesn't have a tech background, fear not! You don't need to write any HTML or CSS in WeWeb to design beautiful user interfaces, we do it for you. What it means is that WeWeb lets you actually design anything without limits, from mobile to desktop, using a drag-and-drop editor.
Because WeWeb is a thin layer of abstraction on top of the latest web design standards, what you've learned in other tools like Figma or Webflow can be applied to WeWeb. As a result, many WeWeb users have told us it's easier for Figma designers to build in WeWeb compared to Bubble which uses a programming language of its own.
Here’s an example of how to design a responsive sidebar using WeWeb:
A big part of any web application is actually reacting to user inputs. That’s where workflows come into play.
In Bubble, workflows are powerful, but follow a linear path and are hard to adapt to complex conditional needs. While in WeWeb, every workflow can follow complex paths thanks to our powerful workflows designer.
In fact, you can create complex workflows in WeWeb by simply drag and dropping actions. You can create branches by using if/else blocks or any other control flow action. You can even create loops or handle errors at action level.
For those of you who are experimented no-code developers, building a workflow in WeWeb is like creating one in Make (ex-Integromat): possibilities are endless.
If SEO is a big subject for you (for example, when building a user-facing app, like a marketplace), WeWeb has got you covered.
WeWeb is a Single-Page Application (SPA) which means that the pages load very quickly, ensuring high user experience and good pagespeed scores. But if SEO is paramount for you, you can even ask WeWeb to render some of your pages statically. What it means is that the content will be rendered as static HTML, and won't need JavaScript to get displayed to the users, and to the Google crawler bot. While in Bubble, this is impossible as all pages get rendered by their own servers and JavaScript.
Also, WeWeb enables every SEO features like changing tag types (h1, p, a, etc), meta titles, meta descriptions, opengraph and structured data. We also have in the works to let you edit your robots.txt and sitemap.xml files (for the moment, they're auto-generated).
Lastly, WeWeb apps are frontend apps only, meaning that when you use our hosting, they get deployed on a worldwide content delivery network (CDN) at Amazon Web Services, ensuring your app to get hosted really close to your users in the whole world
Most web applications need to use external libraries or custom components at some point. It’s doable in both Bubble and WeWeb, but both tools differ quite substantially on this topic.
In Bubble, integrating third-party tools means developing a plugin. And while this is totally possible, it’s very specific to Bubble. Indeed, to develop a plugin in Bubble, you’ll need to integrate the third-party API "the Bubble way", following their docs. Also, the development phase happens in an iframe, which is slow and hard to use.
In WeWeb, it’s totally different. The first thing you can do is simply use any third-party tool using our REST API or GraphQL plugins. You’ll just have to connect to the tool the same way you might do elsewhere, by following their docs, not ours.
And if that’s not enough, developing components or plugins in WeWeb is simply developing JS-based elements (using VueJS, a popular open-source library). In a few weeks, it’ll even be possible entirely visually using our editor and not having to type any JavaScript line of code anymore.
And don't worry if you're not a developer, you don't have to develop your own custom components to build gorgeous interfaces in WeWeb. It's just that, if you choose to do so, it's possible and we'll be there to help along the way:
A Bubble app is a very specific piece of code that can be interpreted only on Bubble’s own servers, meaning exporting the final web application is impossible.
In WeWeb, any yearly paid plan offers you the possibility to export your app, so you can host it anywhere. Once exported, the app is fully yours and is a standard Vue.js Single-Page Application, which any developer or devops can host easily like a classic frontend JavaScript app.
Also, as self-hosting is possible and WeWeb does not store any dynamic data from your web application on our servers (even while building), meaning it’s possible to create GDPR or HIPAA-compliant apps in WeWeb.
To see what an exported app looks like, you can download one by clicking here.
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Bubble is a powerful tool, but does many things its own way.
WeWeb follows web standards, providing a powerful experience that will help you create web application frontends that:
Don't take our word for it, try WeWeb right now!
Sign up now, pay when you're ready to publish.
