Long-time Bubble & Xano user here. I’m VERY comfortable using Bubble as I’ve spent endless nights with no sleep for months and months learning how to do every weird crazy thing to make my price comparison application work.
The recent price change has made me a bit wary of Bubble’s future, but at the same time, once they made the adjustments to the WU calculations, I did see a MASSIVE decrease in WU’s on my plan so I’m not really affected by price, at least right now. I also have a lot of really innovative ideas for my app and I hate the idea of building out these new features on my app only to find out that certain actions hurt me more than others due to an arbritrary sheet of WU calculations.
That said, I currently have the comfort level building in Bubble knowing that I can largely build anything I can picture in my mind down to the pixel. Sure, some processes might take longer to build on Bubble compared to others, but I at least don’t have to worry about the hassle of “starting over”.
WeWeb is very appealing, and considering my site does A LOT of interacting with my Xano DB, I will say pulling data from Xano to the frontend is much smoother from my brief testing on WeWeb.
Before I really sink my teeth in to Bubble, the following doubts/questions come to my mind and I’m wondering if there is any kind of info from a Bubble founder/staff member that has addressed these in light of the recent spike of interest in Bubble alternatives:
Bubble is a nocode OG. They have been around the block and have seen so much criticism and feedback over the years. They’ve got a massive user community with what feels like endless content of support material. They are also well-funded with plans to scale even faster with the new price hike. Part of me says it’s hard to bet against such a big player, but people also said that about IBM back in the day.
Is WebWeb (or any other front-end builder) only better because they don’t have a massive user base Bubble has? Perhaps Bubble is unique because they are also trying to be a backend company as well, but is the reason WeWeb is so smooth for people simply because the company isn’t dealing with the demands that Bubble deals with? What would WeWeb look like if it hit the user numbers Bubble have?
With that growth, is WeWeb (or other newer players) doomed to make the same “hard decisions” to revamp pricing? Again, I have my doubts about this critique as I think Bubble’s biggest growth issue from a tech standpoint is trying to be an all-in-one solution.
What is WeWeb doing to be SEO-friendly? I certainly have my complaints about Bubble’s SEO abilities, especially when it comes to creating a page for every item in your database. If all 10,000 of my products were in Bubble’s DB, their sitemap automatically creates a URL for them. So for example product number 8876 would have a URL on the sitemap like domain(.com)/product/8876.
Ever since swithing to Xano to hold my products, my Bubble sitemap now just has the one “template” page: domain(.com)/product/. Even though domain(.com)/product/8876 works for the user, it’s not added to the sitemap so what I need to do now is use Xano to generate a sitemap file with all of my product URLs so that Google can easily index them. Will I have to do the same in WeWeb? Is there even a place for us to customize or even upload our own sitemap?
I guess what I am in search of is a video/article/Twitter thread from WeWeb addressing current concerns from potentially new users and also showing what the future of WeWeb looks like because I really am interested in leaving Bubble, I just have a hard time betting against such a big player at the end of the day…
the only real downside to weweb vs bubble is the dynamic page SEO that you are in need of. it only exists for static collections of data that are shipped with the app at time of building VS any item in your bubble DB that is of a certain type.
what i am speaking to, is currently the lack of being able to have dynamic SEO for any item added to my external DB.
i.e. On bubble, i could have a product page, for example. i could publish my app with 10 items. share a link to any 1 of those product pages, and have the open graph/twitter details/meta data display in a share link. I could then add 1 million more pages to my DB and be able to expect the same results.
On weweb, currently, that only works for items that are in a collection that is shiped with the app at time of clicking the publish button. i hear that there are plans to change this to mirror what bubble does in the future but currently that is not capable.
Thank you for correcting my previous statement about the dynamic page publishing!
To say it all I think Bubble generates the page header dynamically on the server for every request, and then renders the page content client side.
Any data that you put in the page head gets to the client without js execution, that’s why SEO for open graph/twitter details/meta works as described by Jared.
Hmm this part I haven’t looked into super deep yet and SEO is a major focus for me moving forward. What I am building is very similar to the Stream+ application that WeWeb has in their showcase.
It’s clear they have a /movie/ page that then displays different content depending on what movie ID follows in the URL. So for the new Mario movie the URL is https://www.streamplus.app/movies/502356/ and when I look at the Open Graph and meta tags it appears the SEO information updates to reflect the specific movie of that page. Granted, there is clearly some kind of sitemap issue happening with this site because NONE of the movie/show pages are indexed by Google but that is perhaps a separate issue that can be fixed.
So is this Stream+ app not using dynamic pages because the data of the movie stays the same? The one thing that would hypothetically change on that page is the review scores (unless it actually doesn’t). My product database would be very similar in that the details of a gaming monitor will always remain the same, the only details that change regularly are the prices for that product as well as the latest review scores.
So with WeWeb as-is, are you suggesting that moving from Bubble (for my particular needs) would be a step back from Bubble?
Nice thread, thank you for your interest and for taking the time to write these questions here.
Summarising your questions into two categories to try and answer them: 1) How important is it to have a critical size, & 2) SEO.
Critical size
Bubble greatly benefits from its large community and marketplace. WeWeb’s community is smaller but we try to compensate by a) having built the most important “plugins” as native functionalities in WeWeb + when a critical one is missing, we get the feedback and try to ship it fast ; b) creating a comprehensive library of video tutorials so that our users can learn WeWeb directly from us. The part 1 of our academy is live and the part 2 will be released by mid-June; c) being very responsive and provide hands-on support as much as we can ; d) progressively opening up plugin creation to community members to create the fondation of a future WeWeb marketplace - we should start it by Q4 this year. We anticipate the marketplace to grow fast as plugins and components can be written in standard code (vue.js), no custom language to learn.
Having raised a lot of money surely gives some form of guarantees for the future to the community. Although we didn’t raise a giga round, we have a couple of guarantees to offer. First of all, WeWeb is profitable. Second, we have very large & demanding customers already using us. These large companies ran thorough audits on WeWeb before selecting us as their provider. By deciding to use us, we think they sent a message to the market that betting on us is safe.
When a company gets big, one might think that such company stops shipping and/or stops listening to their users. I think there are nice counter examples to that like Stripe or Datadog. In the end, what matters is the culture that company has and its resilience at scale. Those who know us tend to say that our culture of listening to users & shipping fast didn’t change since our beginnings, and we intend to keep it that way as we scale.
SaaS pricing changes is a frequent thing. We did it twice and our policy has always been to grandfather every “legacy” pricing so there are no bad surprise for existing users. That said, it is a “soft” moral contract between us and our users. The “hard” guarantee is that you can export your code, which is standard (vue.js) and can run it on any servers with no strings attached to us. So your apps can live without WeWeb. Also, in the future I believe it will be easier to import front-end code from a platform to another. This year people will be able to import most of their Webflow front-ends to WeWeb for example (because their code is standard). I believe this trend will continue to grow in the future.
SEO
When you create static pages in WeWeb, you can manage their metadata, open graph & structured data and the site map is automatically created and includes every static page you create. You can have up to 1000 static pages generated in WeWeb.
If you need more pages, and / or if you need your pages to be dynamic, your pages will be indexed, but they won’t have the open graph displayed properly when sharing a link (because we do not have the data in our servers, as WeWeb is decoupled). The sitemap will not be updated neither with these dynamic pages URLs. These are temporary issues that we plan to fix gradually. First, we will enable the access to the sitemap to our users in May. Then we should find a solution to enable dynamic generation of open-graph data, but we will not have the time to do it before Q4 this year.
On weweb, currently, that only works for items that are in a collection that is shiped with the app at time of clicking the publish button. i hear that there are plans to change this to mirror what bubble does in the future but currently that is not capable.
I encourage you to review this thread on the topic for a functional workaround.
