I am the tech lead in my company and were asked to investigate and prototype some no-code/low-code builders. We have had a lot of initially positive experience with weweb. Unfortunately after spending quite some time on it we have hit many roadblockers and also started to doubt the direction weweb is heading
Weweb is an amazing tool for building MVPs, but is nowhere close to support real production webapps that require proper dev workflows.
I just want to share our experience here so it might help to improve the tool in the future
- Wewebs Export Functionality - The promise of exporting your project and hosting it in your own environment is awesome. However the exported code is basically a non-readable mess. Weweb says this is on purpose so it runs smoothly. We as a company have same obligations to do proper QA on everything that gets pushed to production, this also includes security scans on a source code level. Its basically impossible to run and address issues that were found by such scans. For compliance reasons why could not move any of the prototypes we have built into production
- Wewebs poor Editor performance - There has been endless experiences where the editor takes ages to load, doesnt load at all or just gets stuck. When our POC was small this did not happen, however as the application got bigger, this became a daily concurrence. For a business its just not feasible that devs are just locked out of their “IDE” for random reasons
- Missing SOC2 or ISO certification - I think i dont need to go into much detail here. Its a big no-go
- Buggy Plugins and no options to fix it - Whilst all plugins seem very useful at first, most of them are just incomplete (in terms of missing crucial functionality) and some are even bugged. We have raised some of those issues before with documented screenshots and absolutely no action was taken. Big dealbreaker here is weweb does not allow to introduce custom plugins, only for “selected partners”. Some of the bugs could be fixed within 10 minutes but without an option to use our own fixed plugin, that doesnt matter.
- No version branching - This was already raised by the community in 2023(!!!) and still gets kicked down the road, release after release. Again big no-go
- Roadmap Planning - The current roadmap planning just seems odd. There seems to be a big focus on AI driven development + a backend builder(???). We initially focused on weweb because it gave us full frontend component control, if we wanted to use AI, we would use any other the many other well-built, bigger funded apps. The backend builder is in my opinion is just something nobody has asked for. I think weweb would profit from actually listening to their community more. There is still no SSR support, no branching, a poor and underdeveloped marketplace, no styling framework support (tailwind, shadn, …)
- Weweb’s company outlook - Compared to other no-code/low-code builder the development and improvements of weweb are incredibly slow. Upon checking we see that their are only 20 employees of whom not all of them are technical. Also overall funding seems very low compared to other tools. All of this makes us concerned that even if we would decide to use weweb for a production app, and weweb runs out of money, we would get handed over poor source code without any IDE that previously many devs would have worked with, ultimately forcing businesses to potentially needing to rebuild the entire app
We still believe WeWeb is a great platform with a lot of potential. However, users should be aware of its current limitations, anything beyond the MVP stage requires careful consideration to avoid unpleasant surprises later on. The community clearly wants to help WeWeb grow but with no support for custom plugins and an inactive marketplace, that collaboration is currently very limited.
