DEV Community: Monika Ambrozowicz

An admin panel with thousands of n8n automations under the hood

Monika Ambrozowicz — Tue, 20 Jun 2023 16:00:10 +0000

We're thrilled to announce an integration of Forest Admin and n8n. This integration allows Forest Admin to take the first steps towards workflow automation, bringing even more power than a person could build.

n8n is an open-source workflow automation tool that allows users to quickly and easily create powerful workflows, automating tasks and processes across different applications and services. It supports thousands of services out of the box, including Slack, Google Sheet, Hubspot, Customer.io, custom HTTP endpoint, and much more.

For the past few years, n8n has become really popular as an open-source workflow automation tool. Here at Forest Admin, we are huge fans of it. We use n8n regularly, and it's become one of the most important resources in our company. We highly respect the company and almost cannot stop talking about it and expressing our admiration every day.

An admin panel with thousands of automations under the hood

When we created Forest Admin, our mission was to help companies focus their development effort on customer-facing apps, thereby reducing the time and resources they spend on internal tools like the admin panel.

The admin panel is initially seen as a simple CRUD interface. As time goes on, it becomes increasingly necessary to have custom actions, permission control, and an optimized user interface in order to effectively oversee the company's entire business operations.

With the n8n integration, we are taking a big leap forward in workflow automation with Forest Admin, providing an admin panel that offers a wealth of features that would be out of reach for most development teams.

Forest Admin starts off from the foundation of the CRUD admin panel to end with the go-to-tool for all of a company’s operations.

The integration of Forest Admin and n8n opens thousands of possible actions and automations launched from an admin panel. Here are just a few of them identified by the first users of this integration:

Enrich user information with CRM data for better lead scoring.
Anonymize user data with one click on the button. Send a SMS reminder for nearing subscription renewals.
Export customer orders and generate automated invoices.
Change a user's subscription and send a Slack notification to the team.
Export a list of transactions, and send an automated email with a csv file to the accounting.
Generate a push notification when a payment is received.
… And much more. The possibilities and third-party integrations available are endless!

How does it work?

Getting started with automations on Forest Admin is super easy, and it doesn’t require coding unless you want to add additional customization and functionalities.

Create your n8n workflow

Go to n8n and create a new workflow with a webhook trigger.

Then select POST as the HTTP method and copy the Webhook URL.

Create the Forest Admin action

In the settings panel of the collection that the action is associated with, create a new action and select n8n. Simply paste the Webhook URL and you're all set!

Real-life end-to-end example

In the following example, let's say I am part of the Customer Care team of a fintech company and one of my responsibilities is to onboard new companies that have just signed up. To do my job efficiently, I go to my Forest Admin "Onboarding" Workspace every day and make a decision as to whether or not to validate the new account.

In order to have a maximum amount of information on the company that I must validate, I have created an "Enrich Data" action button which gives me a whole series of information that will help me make the decision such as the number of employees of the company, its estimated annual income, the total amount of its funding raises, its creation date, etc.

In the following example, I use the company "Avvo". Based on the enrichment data, I can confidently validate the account by clicking on the "Mark as live" button. All of this is done through one single interface, optimizing the number of clicks to access the information and trigger the necessary actions depending on the situation.

The implementation of the n8n workflow is simple. First, I retrieve the details of the selected company through a SQL query on my database. I then ask Clearbit for the company domain name and ask it to enrich this company. Then, I do a second enrichment phase with another tool, Apollo. Finally, I update the record of my database with the new data retrieved from this enrichment.

Try it by yourself for free

Forest Admin, the pioneer of low code internal tools, is now free with unlimited users

Monika Ambrozowicz — Wed, 02 Nov 2022 10:55:53 +0000

In the last couple of weeks, the tech industry has witnessed several announcements about increasing prices of popular tools. Heroku has canceled its free plan after offering it for over a decade. Slack has increased its price and limited its free plan to only 3 months. Figma lovers are worried if Adobe – the new owner of their essential design tool – is going to limit its free plan as well, even if there are no such talks at the moment.

Forest Admin, the pioneer of low code internal tools, has made the decision to go against the trend and offer a fully-functional and customisable admin panel solution for free for unlimited users. It means that regardless of how many people use Forest Admin in a given company, it will be free of charge. This update reflects the long-term mission of Forest Admin to make developers’ lives easier and, even more importantly, they feel that it better fits its users’ different stages of growth.

“We want as many people as possible to be able to use Forest Admin and reap the benefits of having a powerful, easy-to-use admin panel from day one.”
Sandro Munda, Forest Admin’s CEO

Now, developers can sign up for a free account (no credit card required), set up a fully-functional internal tool in the blink of an eye, and invite an unlimited number of users. All of it for free – no catch.

Forest Admin also has a paid offer for businesses that need more than what the free plan offers. The paid version enables setting up roles and permissions to determine who can do what on the admin panel and quickly adjust it when needed. For example, a C-level executive will not see or use an admin panel in the same way as a developer who needs more technical data. Likewise, an operational person will need to see the data in a specific way to do their work efficiently. This feature is a part of a Team plan that costs $12 per user.

On top of that, there are advanced functionalities for established businesses that need advanced security features like SSO or IP Whitelisting, approval workflows, collaborations features, and more. These can be found in a new Plus plan that costs $48 per user. All details can be found on the pricing page.

About Forest Admin

Founded in 2017, Forest Admin is a low-code internal tool solution that helps developers save time and provide their business’ teams with internal tools such as fully-featured admin panels, dashboards and database manipulation tools that are tailored to their operations and ready to scale. Thanks to its unique hybrid architecture, Forest Admin offers a business-grade level of security as user data never reaches Forest Admin servers.

Top 5 MariaDB GUI tools in 2022

Monika Ambrozowicz — Mon, 01 Aug 2022 12:48:57 +0000

According to the DB-Engines Ranking, MariaDB ranks 12th overall, and 8th among the relational databases, ahead of Microsoft Azure, Amazon DynamoDB, Snowflake, Redshift, and hundreds of others. What is more interesting though, is that MariaDB was ranked 20th just five years ago, and its popularity only seems to grow.

MariaDB is an open-source fork of MySQL, compared to which it has faster performance, and is more suitable for large-sized data. Both databases are highly compatible with each other, which allows a lot of tools to work equally well with MariaDB and MySQL. It is also true for Forest Admin as the onboarding is exactly the same whether you choose one of them or another. The same can be said for other popular MariaDB GUI tools, like DBeaver, dbForge Studio, HeidiSQL, but some tools are either dedicated to one database or they perform slightly better depending on the database.

Now let’s have a look at the most widely-used database GUI tools that are proven to work well with MariaDB. We have chosen them based on the official MariaDB Knowledge Base, their popularity on the r/MariaDB community on Reddit, and reviews left on TrustPilot.

DBeaver

DBeaver is a free and open source multiplatform tool for all people who work with databases. Apart from MariaDB, it supports MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, MS Access, MongoDB, Redis, and many more databases. It is actively maintained, and users are invited to report bugs and suggest features on the DBeaver GitHub page.

DBeaver for MariaDB. Source: https://dbeaver.io/

Basic features:

Data viewer and editor: sorting, filtering, export, etc.,
Data and metadata search,
Metadata browser: viewing and editing tables, views, columns, users, roles, procedures, etc.
File export and import, from a variety of formats such as CSV, HTML, XML, JSON, XLS, and XLSX.
SQL editor.

Supported platforms:

Linux,
Windows,
macOS.

Pros:

DBeaver is easy to install and to connect to a database. It runs as a desktop application, which is good for beginners as no CLI proficiency is required to get started.
You can run SQL queries even without strong SQL skills.
It comes with strong features to view and manipulate your data.
Users praise its predictive typing and claim DBeaver saves them a lot of time.

Cons:

Some users complain about old school-looking UI.
The fact DBeaver runs locally, as a desktop application, may also decrease its performance. To tackle this problem, you need to switch to an enterprise plan.

dbForge Studio

dbForge Studio is a fully-featured GUI tool to develop, manage, and administer MariaDB and MySQL databases. It is developed by Devart, one of the leading developers of database management software, ALM solutions, and data providers for the most popular database servers. dbForge is a full-fledged MariaDB (and MySQL) GUI that is used to create and execute queries, analyze data, compare and synchronize databases, and much more. dbForge Studio is not available for free, the pricing starts at $179.95 per year.

dbForge Studio for MariaDB. Source: https://www.devart.com/

Basic features:

Intelligent SQL Coding,
Database compare and sync,
Data import and export,
Database copying, designer, refactoring, data generator, administration, backup, migration,
Query profiling,
Visual query builder,
MySQL debugger,
Table designer,
Reports and analytics.

Supported platforms:

Windows

Pros:

dbForge Studio is a powerful GUI tool with a rich visual design, and an intuitive UI.
Users praise its SQL editor, code suggestions, stability, and a user-friendly interface.

Cons:

dbForge Studio is not officially available for Linux and MacOs.
It is neither free nor open source, but there is a 30-day free trial.

DbSchema

DbSchema is a visual database design and management tool for all relational and a few No-SQL databases. It claims to help with design, documenting and managing databases without having to be an SQL expert, as the schema can be edited with a few clicks, without writing complex SQL queries. DbSchema is reverse-engineering the database schema and visualizing it as diagrams. After 15 days of a free trial, the price of DbSchema starts at $98 for academic purposes.

DB Schema dor MariaDB. Source: https://dbschema.com/

Features:

Logical & physical design,
Interactive diagrams,
Generating interactive HTML5 documentation,
Schema synchronization,
Visual query builder,
Relational data editor,
Editing and executing SQL queries,
CSV editor for large files,
Database reports & charts,
Automating schema deployment & tasks,
Dark theme, and more.

Supported platforms:

Linux,
Windows,
macOS.

Pros:

DbSchema’s users praise it for supporting multiple databases, simple and intuitive UI, and useful but not overly complicated features.
It uses a copy of schema structure, which is independent and separated from the MariaDb database. DbSchema can handle large databases with more than 10.000 tables. Connecting to another database won't change the model schema unless you choose to refresh it from the database.

Cons:

The free version is limited.

Navicat for MariaDB

Navicat is a graphical front-end for MariaDB. It is compatible with all versions of MariaDB and with MySQL 3.21 and above. It is a part of a bigger Navicat ecosystem of products like Navicat Premium (a multi-connection database development and administration tool which can simultaneously connect 7 databases), Navicat for MySQL, Navicat for MongoDB, Navicat for Oracle, and more. All of them are commercial tools, with pricing that starts at $119.00 per user.

Navicat for MariaDB. Source: https://www.navicat.com/

Supported platforms:

Linux,
Windows,
macOS
iOS.

Basic features:

SQL processing: SQL editor, find and replace, create parameter queries, open query files in an external editor, console.
Data Viewer and Editor: grid view; Text, Hex, Image or Web viewer/editor, raw mode editing, filter records.
Import/export data from/to plain text file formats: TXT, CSV, XML, JSON
Dump/Execute SQL file
Collaboration: create projects, add members
Synchronize connections and queries
More features are available in higher plans. Check Navicat for MariaDB’s website for the complete feature matrix.

Pros:

As a commercial product, it comes with more features than most of its open-source counterparts.
Navicat is user-friendly, users like its modern UI, and the fact that Navicat is very quick and easy to get started with.

Cons:

Navicat’s pricing can be a blocker for smaller projects.
It tends to be resource-intensive.

HeidiSQL

HeidiSQL is a free open source tool initially built for MariaDB and MySQL, and now also supporting PostgreSQL, MicrosoftSQL, and SQLite. HeidiSQL is only available for Windows, as a Windows app, which doesn’t prevent it from being ranked as one of the most popular tools for MariaDB and MySQL.

HeidiSQL UI. Source: https://www.heidisql.com/screenshots.php?which=database

Basic features:

Connecting to multiple servers in one window.
Connect to servers via command line.
Creating and edit tables, views, stored routines, triggers and scheduled events,
Exporting from one server/database directly to another server/database.
Managing user-privileges.
Exporting table rows as CSV, HTML, XML, SQL, LaTeX, Wiki Markup and PHP Array.
Browsing and editing table-data using a comfortable grid.
Bulk edit tables (move to db, change engine, collation etc.).
Writing queries with customizable syntax-highlighting and code-completion.

Supported platforms:

Windows

Pros:

For non-English speakers, HeidiSQL is available in 22 other languages.
It’s a very good lightweight tool for managing several databases at the same time.
It’s free and open source.
HeidiSQL is easy to install as a Windows app and to use.

Cons:

According to some users, HeidiSQL is buggy and it doesn’t provide advanced debugging features.
Low stability. Despite the wide popularity, HeidiSQL is known for bugs and issues.
It is only available for Windows, just like dbForge Studio

MariaDB GUI tool or MariaDB admin panel?

Admin panels, internal tools, and database GUI tools are often used interchangeably. After all, their main functionalities are similar – all allow accessing data and performing at least basic CRUD operations. Database GUI clients give their users full control over their data but they need to operate on raw SQL queries, which is a blocker for non-technical users. If it’s not an issue, and/or a database GUI tool is used infrequently, mostly for firefighting, you may not need a fully-featured admin panel.

The situation changes when sales, operations, customer support, marketing, and other, typically non-technical teams need secure access to data to perform their day-to-day activities in an efficient manner. Internal tools like admin panels offer much more functionalities, including roles and permissions management, approval workflows, adding data, creating visual dashboards, editing content, contacting users, validating documents, sharing internal tools with external partners, and so on.

Forest Admin - a MariaDB admin panel

Forest Admin belongs to the second category. As a fully-featured admin panel solution, it can act as a database GUI, or easily become a powerful internal tool that fits every business logic. Unlike competitors, Forest Admin doesn’t just provide the UI, but it scans the data structure and generates a fully-functional admin panel with all basic features like CRUD, search, export, and more, out-of-the-box. Then, you can customize it according to your needs. Thanks to its unique architecture, Forest Admin can never access user data, which stays on their servers.

Forest Admin UI with out-of-the-box features like search and filters. Source: https://www.forestadmin.com/usecases

There are 2 ways of installing Forest Admin – by connecting it to an existing app (built in Django, ExpressJS, Laravel, NestJS, Ruby on Rails, and more integrations are on the way) or directly to a database. At the moment, Forest Admin is available for MariaDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MicrosoftSQL Server, and MongoDB. And here is what one of our users has recently told us:

I really appreciate how easy ForestAdmin makes it to make frequent DB schema changes without breaking the UI. I haven't heard of any other tools that are able to handle schema changes so well!

Summary

As you can see, there is no shortage of database tools. Some provide basic functionality, while others offer advanced all-in-one tools used by thousands of team members to manipulate the data. There are also solutions like Forest Admin that let you quickly start with a small project and then easily scale it once it grows. If you want to give it a try, get started for free today.

NestJS vs ExpressJS: Which is better for your project

Monika Ambrozowicz — Mon, 11 Jul 2022 13:08:22 +0000

Rumour has it that ExpressJS has been slowly declining in popularity. Although the latest results of Stack Overflow’s 2022 survey don’t seem to prove it, it’s true that Express has gained serious competitors. NestJS, Koa, Fastify, and other frameworks are becoming more popular, and product managers tend to debate whether to build their next project with ExpressJS, or rather give new (yet already mature) frameworks a chance.

Forest Admin is compatible with apps built with ExpressJS, NestJS, and soon it will also be available for Koa and Fastify developers. In this article, we compare ExpressJS with NestJS to help you choose the best framework for your application, as some of the differences between them are fundamental.

ExpressJS: Lightweight and the most widely-used

According to Stack Overflow’s 2022 survey, ExpressJS is still among the most widely used web frameworks, and it is considered a very rational choice to build large-scale applications with. Express is a JavaScript framework, so both the frontend and the backend can be built using the same (extremely popular) language.

One of the biggest strengths of Express is its strong community and the number of available plugins. For example, storing sessions, cookies, parsing a payload, and so on, are available out-of-the-box, and it takes much less time and lines of code to build an application with this framework. Another big advantage of Express is that it is supported with the Google V8 engine, which ensures high performance without lags or errors in the processing.

NestJS: Reliable and scalable

Finally, ExpressJS is considered lightweight and straightforward. Its popularity and a strong community makes it easier not only to find resources but also support.

NestJS is a rapidly growing NodeJS framework, and it seems the growing number of developers prefers it over ExpressJS. It serves the same purpose – to build efficient, reliable and scalable server-side applications – but it does it in a very different way.

NestJS is inspired by Angular, which is a big advantage for developers who are already familiar with it. At the same time, everything supported in Express, for example Express functions, is also supported in Nest, which makes switching from one framework to another easier.

A big advantage of NestJS is that it is built with TypeScript, which makes the application reliable and less prone to bugs. It makes NestJS a particularly good choice for building large-scale applications. However, using JavaScript is also possible with Nest.

ExpressJS vs. NestJS

The biggest difference between these frameworks is that NestJS is opinionated, and ExpressJS is not. It means Express gives developers the freedom to make multiple possibilities and implement code as per the need, as it doesn’t have a set of pre-defined rules to follow. Such a flexibility is appreciated by many developers, and it’s beneficial for smaller flexible teams, but once team size and app’s complexity grows, the lack of structure becomes a problem.

NestJS, on the other hand, uses the “convention over configuration” paradigm that attempts to decrease the number of decisions developers need to make, and it is expected of them to write the repos, service, and controllers in a specific manner.

On top of that, NestJS follows the MVC architecture with components like modules, controllers, and providers, used to control logic, data, and implement the UI. ExpressJS doesn’t follow MVC, which in some projects leads to ineffectiveness and inefficiency due to the lack of structure.

Despite these differences, both Express and Nest are suitable frameworks for building single-page applications, e-commerce websites, fintech, and streaming applications. Both are the most widely-used Node.js frameworks, and although Express is more popular (57k stars on Github compared to 48k given to NestJS), the popularity of Nest is growing faster.

Forest Admin for ExpressJS & NestJS

An example of an admin panel built with Forest Admin. Source: Live Demo, Forest Admin has no access to user data!

Whether you choose building your web application with ExpressJS or NestJS, you can still equip it with a powerful admin panel thanks to Forest Admin. However, the choice between Express and Nest will impact the way you integrate it with Forest Admin, as our brand new NestJS integration has been built in a recently developed way, with lots of new benefits, such as:

Low code customization. You will write less code, only when you really need to do it. Forest Admin magic will do the rest, without compromising on data security. It is also true if you choose Express, but requires a bit more coding.
Clearer concepts. We no longer distinguish between collections and smart collections, relationships and smart relationships, etc. Forest Admin for NestJS/SQL has collections, relationships, fields, and so on. Easier concepts means faster and hassle-free customization.
Always in sync with your database. Thanks to Forest Admin SQL integration, each time your server restarts, your admin panel UI is in-sync with your database.

We strongly recommend giving Forest Admin for NestJS a try, but our integration with Express is equally reliable and it has been tested by a thousand of users. Whether you need a robust and flexible admin panel for an Express, Nest, (and soon also Koa or Fastify) app, get started with Forest Admin for free.

The guide to Laravel admin panels

Monika Ambrozowicz — Mon, 23 May 2022 11:35:57 +0000

Are you researching different options to ship an admin panel for your Laravel application? One idea would be to build it from scratch with Laravel. After all, this PHP-based framework facilitates building various products, including internal tools.

Where is the catch, then? Well… You’ll have to engage not only Laravel developers but also UX, Design, and Product. Otherwise, you risk equipping your business teams with inefficient tools and jeopardizing their productivity. Even the founders of Laravel have thought about it and created Laravel Nova with out-of-the-box functionalities like CRUD interface, search, filters, notifications, and more. But is Laravel Nova the only option you have? Not at all. We have tested and compared other admin panel solutions for Laravel to help you make an informed choice.

Types of Laravel admin panels

Before diving in, let’s have a quick look at different types of Laravel admin panels because it is important to differentiate back-end CRUD interfaces from visual builders and admin panel templates.

Visual builders

Thanks to visual UI builders, you can create and manage your admin panel directly from the no-code GUI, typically using drag-and-drop builders. They remind CMS systems but usually, visual admin panel builders offer more functionalities than adding and updating content.

Visual builders are useful when your team is small and there are either no developers who can manage internal tools, or when you want to give non-technical business teams the ownership of the tools they use. However, keep in mind that no-code builders typically have limited customization options.

In the next section, you will find a detailed description of visual builders for Laravel admin panels, such as Voyager and Backpack DevTools.

CRUD interfaces

CRUD operations are the fundament of internal tools. That’s because these days it’s hard to find an application that involves users and/or data that doesn’t interact with a database. Every user that makes an edit to an item in the system, adds a new one or deletes data that is no longer necessary, performs one of the CRUD (create, read, update, delete) operations.

A CRUD interface can be built from scratch, but there are many solutions that gives it out-of-the-box. In the next section, you will learn about the most popular packages for Laravel, such as Laravel Nova, Filament, Backpack, and Quick Admin Panel.

The most popular Laravel admin panels

Laravel Nova

Nova is the official admin panel for Laravel, built by Laravel’s creators. It is powered by Vue.js, Vue Router, and Tailwind.css on the front-end, and configured using simple PHP classes on the back-end, which fits the Laravel ecosystem very well. Its primary features include a full CRUD interface, search and filters, graphs and metrics, authorisation, notifications, conditional fields, and more. Additional functionalities are shipped by the community as open-source packages.

Laravel Nova: Pros

Laravel Nova has been built and maintained by the Laravel team so it fits the ecosystem, its design and features.
The UI is clean and user-friendly.
It fits big enterprise projects.

Laravel Nova: Cons

Laravel Nova is not available for free. There is no free trial either but you will get reimbursed if you cancel your license in the first 14 days.
Laravel Nova is not a low code solution. Using it to build internal tools is faster than doing it from scratch but still, it requires some coding and the knowledge of Laravel, PHP, and composer. It also means Laravel Nova can’t be edited and adjusted by non-technical team members.
The out-of-the-box features are hard to customize.

Filament

Unlike other solutions from this article, Filament doesn’t advertise as an admin panel or internal tool solution but as a collection of tools for rapidly building beautiful TALL (tailwindccc, Alpine.js, Laravel, Livewire) stack apps. It has an admin panel, a table builder, and a form builder. The Filament community is also creating packages with complementary features like custom fields, different integrations, charts, and much more.

Filament: Pros

Filament is an open-source project with a strong community that keeps building packages and supporting other Filament users.
It is a clean and simple solution that makes it possible to get an up and running admin panel in a few minutes.

Filament: Cons

There is a simple feature for roles but Filament doesn’t allow to setup a more complex system for teams and permissions.
There is no visual layout editor, which doesn’t allow non-tech team members to customize the tool they use on a daily basis.

Backpack

Backpack is another popular solution for shipping a Laravel admin panel. It requires a minimal technology stack of Laravel, Bootstrap, and jQuery to customize everything in Backpack. On top of that, it’s possible (but not required) to use Vue, React, Webpack, Mix, Less, Saass, NPM, and more.

Backpack has two core packages: Backpack\CRUD that accelerates the process of building CRUD interfaces, and Backpack\Base responsible for login, password reset, error pages, and so on. However, it is also modular and easy to extend, which makes it a powerful solution, also for complex apps.

Laravel Backpack: Pros

Backpack gives Laravel developers a lot of customization opportunities, much more compared to Nova and Filament.
Filters are powerful and can be easily implemented.
Clear and detailed documentation

Laravel Backpack: Cons

Backpack is not free for any commercial use.
Its customization opportunities are a double-edged sword as every change requires quite a lot of manual coding.

Voyager

Voyager is called the Missing Laravel Admin, probably because unlike Nova, Filament, and Backpack, Voyager is a visual builder that makes it easy to use by junior devs and those with limited coding skills. Voyager has six main features: Media Manager (similar to what we know from WordPress), Menu Builder (allowing to quickly add, edit, and delete menu items), Database Manager (an alternative to Laravel’s Schema), a BREAD/CRUD builder that allows to Browse, Read, Edit, Add, and Delete entries and views of any table in the database, Settings, and Compass that helps with Voyager resources.

Laravel Voyager: Pros

Easy to start with and use, clear documentation and a strong community.
It’s free and open source.

Laravel Voyager: Cons

The UI, which makes it so easy to manage, is also limiting.
It doesn’t fit complex apps that require setting up role-based permissions, approval workflows, and other less typical features.

Quick Admin Panel

Quick Admin Panel is an online internal tool generator for Laravel apps. To get started, you need to sign up on the website, create a project, and add chosen functionalities, such as menus, fields, and relationships. Then, Quick Admin Panel will generate Laravel files that need to be downloaded and installed just like any other Laravel project.

Quick Admin Panel: Pros

Quick Admin Panel is, as the name suggests, quick. Even the website hints that it’s a good choice for an MVP, a first version of a new Laravel project.
Quick Admin Panel generates Laravel code and files, and everything can be customized later.

Quick Admin Panel: Cons

Your needs and models need to be defined upfront, before Quick Admin Panel is generated.
Further customization requires a lot of manual coding.

Forest Admin for Laravel: An all-in-one Laravel admin panel

Last but not least, Forest Admin has recently gained a new integration, and now it’s also available for Laravel. It takes the best of both worlds: With Forest Admin, you get both a CRUD interface out-of-the box, you are free to add functionalities that fit your specific business scenarios, and finally, it has a UI layout editor for non-technical team members.

Forest Admin set up as a KYC solution

Forest Admin: A drag-and-drop layout editor

Here is what else makes it different from the solutions listed above:

Forest Admin has a unique hybrid architecture. Only the frontend is managed on Forest Admin servers, so your customer data remain invisible to Forest Admin. It gives you the flexibility of a no-code SaaS tool without compromising on data security.
Once you install Forest Admin, you get more than 30 features out-of-the-box: CRUD, search and filters, role-based permissions, approval workflows, low code components for chars, etc. Then, you’re free to customize your admin panel by implementing your own actions, visualizing data after applying a specific set of conditions, mirroring your business operations, building virtual relationships between collections, computing data on the go, and more.
Thanks to an intuitive drag and drop UI editor and recently released Workspaces, Forest Admin can be managed by non-technical team members, who typically use it on a daily basis.
Forest Admin is scalable, so you don’t need to worry about what happens if you start with an MVP and then celebrate the exponential growth. Forest Admin is used by new startups, established unicorns and all types of companies in between.

Conclusion

As you can see, if you’re not eager to build an admin panel for your Laravel app from scratch, you’re not alone. The Laravel community has already created a couple of user-friendly and efficient solutions, including those that I didn’t mention in this article, like Admin Architect, Argon, InfyOm Laravel Generator, LaraAdmin, Orchid, and many more. The choice is not easy, but answering these questions will help you make the decision:

Do you have enough resources in development, product, UX, and design in order to build a Laravel admin panel from scratch?
Do you want non-technical team members take ownership of their tools?
Do you need to create a quick MVP or do you need an admin panel that will scale from a few to thousands of users?

I hope this article gave you an overview of different ways of building internal tools for your Laravel application. If you decide to give Forest Admin a try, sign up for free and try it yourself.

Forest Admin: A Laravel Nova alternative

Monika Ambrozowicz — Wed, 20 Apr 2022 09:37:31 +0000

Internal tools are ubiquitous – they are under the hood in Apple, Google, Microsoft, your online banking system, and your favorite ecommerce sites. They have a significant impact on smooth customer support, safe operations, quick incident management, and much more. Admin panels and other internal tools improve productivity, monitor performance, and save a lot of money and resources.

It is almost impossible to find a customer-facing company that doesn’t need them. And although there are many solutions for content management, ticketing software, business intelligence tools, and so on; getting a tailor-made admin panel for specific business needs has always been a tough nut to crack. At Forest Admin, we fix this issue, and we are shipping the growing number of integrations to make sure internal tools can work smoothly with your tech stack. Forest Admin for Laravel is one of them. Let’s have a look at how it compares to another internal tool solution for Laravel, Laravel Nova.

⚠️ Call for beta testers: Forest Admin for Laravel will very soon be available for beta testing. Drop us a line if you’d like to help us!

About Laravel Nova

Before the launch of Laravel Nova, a fully-functional admin panel was a missing puzzle in the Laravel ecosystem, and PHP developers had no choice but to create internal tools for their Laravel applications from scratch. No wonder the launch of Laravel Nova in mid-2018 has been highly anticipated by the Laravel community.

Nova’s primary feature is an out-of-the-box CRUD interface that supports every type of Eloquent relationship. It also allows for viewing and managing resources with custom filters, search, pagination, and more.

On the front-end site, Nova is powered by Vue.js, Vue Router, and Tailwind.css, which gives it a lot of flexibility in regard to customization. On the back-end, Nova is configured entirely using simple PHP classes. No configuration is stored in the database.

Forest Admin: An alternative to Laravel Nova

Forest Admin is an open-source internal tool solution, and Laravel has just joined the library of integrations, next to Rails, Express/Sequelize, Express/Mongoose, and recently released Django. The complete list of Forest Admin integrations is here.

Forest Admin has a unique, API-based architecture that consists of four components: the database, the admin backend, the Forest Admin API server, and the Forest Admin UI server. Thanks to that, user data never leaves their servers and user browser, it never reaches Forest Admin servers. That way, you don’t have to compromise data security over the convenience of a SaaS solution. With Forest Admin, you have both.

To start, you can either generate a Node.js application on your local machine that includes a RESTful API that connects to your database, or install Forest Admin on top of your Rails, Django, Express/Sequelize, Express/Mongoose, or a Laravel app.

Forest Admin also gives you an out-of-the-box CRUD interface, and then you can easily transform it into a fully-functional internal tool to match your own special business scenario.

Check our new Forest Admin for Laravel repository on GitHub and give it a star ⭐ if you like this new Forest Admin project.

Forest Admin vs. Laravel Nova

Both Laravel Nova and Forest Admin for Laravel are fully-functional internal tool solutions for Laravel applications. They share similarities, but there are also significant differences. Let us compare each product in terms of architecture, requirements, setup, onboarding, layout, data connectivity, custom logic, and security.

Technical Aspects

Architecture

Forest Admin: API-based. The UI fetches the data from an API connected to the data source.
Laravel Nova: Server-side rendering application.

SaaS/On-premises

Forest Admin: SaaS UI with a hybrid architecture that makes sure your data never reaches Forest Admin servers. Self-hosted available.
Laravel Nova: Self-hosted.

Open Source?

Forest Admin: Forest Admin is not but the Laravel agent is – just like any component you need to install in your codebase based on your installation choice.
Laravel Nova: No, but possible to customize with Open Source Nova Packages.

Setup

Requirements

Forest Admin: A Laravel backend application if you want to use the Laravel agent. For other tech stacks, you either need a database (PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, MicrosoftSQL) or another natively supported backend technology: Ruby on Rails, Node.js Express/Sequelize and Node.js Express/Mongoose.
Laravel Nova: A Laravel backend application. Good knowledge of Composer and the use of external repositories.

Onboarding

Forest Admin: Fast in-app onboarding (4 easy steps)
Laravel Nova: Deep knowledge of composer, complex configuration.

Layout

Visual Builder:

Forest Admin: Yes, with a robust Layout Editor, a no-code visual builder.

Forest Admin UI. Source: Forest Admin Live Demo.

Laravel Nova: No, you need to code the UI customization.

CRUD + Pagination

Forest Admin: Out of the box. Possibility to disable the record count.

Forest Admin UI. Source: Forest Admin Live Demo.

Laravel Nova: Out of the box. It is possible to choose between three different styles: "simple", "load-more", and "links", depending on the application's needs.

Source: Laravel Nova documentation

Search and Filtering

Forest Admin: Out of the box.

Forest Admin UI. Source: Forest Admin Live Demo.

Laravel Nova: Requires manual implementation of each filter.

Segments

Forest Admin: Out-of-the-box.
Laravel Nova: Lenses that require longer manual implementation.

Themes

Forest Admin: Dark and light themes available.

Forest Admin UI (dark mode). Source: Forest Admin Live Demo.

Laravel Nova: Style customizable with CSS, you need to install a community package to have a dark mode.

Laravel Nova UI (dark mode). Source: [Laravel Nova Product Hunt page.

Data connectivity

SaaS API

Forest Admin: Forest Admin provides native integrations and it's simple to add more through the Smart Features.
Laravel Nova: Requires implementation of your own logic to handle the 3rd party data

Security

Permissions

Forest Admin: Real RBAC system with Roles and Teams, provided out of the box, configurable in the UI. The API is automatically protected according to the configured permissions. These permissions can then be fully delegated to the Operations Manager or Product Manager. SSO available.
Laravel Nova: To get a permissions system, you need to install a community Laravel Nova package.

Authentication

Forest Admin: User/Password, Google Login, SAML-based SSO for Organisations.

Forest Admin Login page
Forest Admin login page with various login options.

Laravel Nova: User/Password.

Two-factor authentication

Forest Admin: Enforced 2FA out of the box.
Laravel Nova: Not out of the box, you need to install a Laravel Nova community package.

Auto Logout

Forest Admin: Out of the box.
Laravel Nova: Not out of the box, you need to install a Laravel Nova community package.

Resources

Forest Admin: Documentation, Live Demo, GitHub.
Laravel Nova: Documentation.

When Laravel Nova may be a better fit for your project

Laravel Nova is a robust solution designed with productivity and user-friendliness in mind. Built by the creators of Laravel, Nova fits the ecosystem very well. It is typically chosen by web agencies to build enterprise projects, and it isn’t meant to be managed and edited by non-technical team members.

It can be added retroactively to any Laravel application, and it saves developers a significant amount of time and work. However, you should keep in mind that Nova is not a low code solution – building an up and running Laravel admin panel requires the knowledge of Laravel, PHP, and composer. Nova is not an open-source solution either. The pricing starts at $99 per one-time purchase license for one developer working on one project. There is no live demo or another way to test it for free, but there is a 14-day trial period, where you can cancel and get reimbursed.

When you should choose Forest Admin for Laravel

You need to ship an admin panel as fast as possible. After all, the idea is to let developers focus on the main app and avoid spending too much time in the back office. With Laravel Nova, it is much faster than building from scratch, but it still requires quite a lot of coding. With Forest Admin, you can have an up and running internal tool in literally a few minutes.
Admin panels are typically used by customer support, sales, and operations teams to solve customer problems, monitor orders, returns, and transactions, analyze data, take care of claims, etc. They not only need a user-friendly interface but also need to be able to customize the tools they use on a daily basis. With Forest Admin and its flexible layout editor, non-tech users are free to do it. On top of that, basic CRUD operations are ready to use with no code, out of the box.
You need internal tools that grow with your company. Forest Admin has flexible pricing and is easy to scale.

Forest Admin vs. Laravel Nova: Conclusion

Choosing the perfect admin panel is never an easy task. After all, your business operations efficiency is at stake. To make an informed decision, we always recommend answering these questions:

How much time will I have to spend implementing both the basic and advanced features?
How difficult and time-consuming will it be to maintain the solution and to teach it to new team members?
Will it scale together with my product and users?
Can I easily find support and documentation if any issues arise?

If you decide to give Forest Admin a try, sign up for free or contact us to discuss your project. 🌲🌲🌲

How to build a MongoDB admin panel

Monika Ambrozowicz — Wed, 16 Feb 2022 15:24:49 +0000

MongoDB doesn’t come with a comprehensive admin panel out of the box. There is Compass, the GUI built by — and for — MongoDB that is made for querying, optimizing, and analyzing data, but it won’t meet every business logic. Building a MongoDB admin panel from scratch is always possible but it does require a lot of dev, product, and UX work.

If you found this article, chances are you’re looking for a low-code admin panel solution to avoid spending long hours on development and maintenance. The good news is that you’re in the right place! I’ll show you how to create a robust and user-friendly admin panel that can be used to interact with customers, manage orders and refunds, monitor transactions, or do whatever your business requires. Here is how it can look like:

The KYC solution that can be built on top of a MongoDB database. Visit the KYC live demo and check how it works.

The fleet management solution that can be built on top of a MongoDB database. Visit the fleet management live demo and check how it works.

A dashboard for transactions monitoring that can be built on top of a MongoDB database. Visit the transactions monitoring and fraud management live demo and check how it works.

How to build a MongoDB admin panel: Forest Admin & alternatives

Once you’ve made the decision that you don’t want to allocate 30% of the dev time on building and maintaining back-office tools, it’s time to choose the perfect solution. In fact, you have a few possibilities:

Pick one of the admin panel templates that are easy to find online. They are often free and very easy to install, but they come with limitations. The idea behind them is to fit the most common needs and there is very little or no customization available.
Take advantage of open-source admin frameworks and libraries. Their pros? Much more flexibility and customization compared to the templates, they’re also free to use. Cons? Setting them up and making edits still requires quite a lot of dev work, even if less than budding a back-office solution from scratch. They can’t be customized by non-tech team members.
Try Forest Admin as it gives you the best of both worlds: The fundamental features, like CRUD operations, search, filters, dashboards, or export, are available out-of-the-box, but you can code functionalities that are advanced or specific to your business.

But what makes Forest Admin truly special is the hybrid architecture that consists of four components: the database and admin backend, the Forest Admin API Server, and the Forest Admin UI Server. Once you create an account and choose a MongoDB or a MongoDB Atlas as a data source, Forest Admin will create a Node.js server for you. Alternatively, if you have an Express application with the Mongoose ORM, Forest Admin will be installed directly into your app. Only the frontend is managed on Forest Admin servers, which gives you the flexibility of a no-code SaaS tool without compromising on data security. And that, contrary to the majority of open source solutions like React Admin or Django Admin, allows non-technical team members to manage the tools and dashboards they rely on every day.

Forest Admin architecture consists of four components: the database, the admin backend, the Forest Admin API server, and the Forest Admin UI server.

And finally, guess what? Forest Admin is perfectly scalable, so you don’t need to worry about what happens with internal tools when your company grows from a few to thousands of employees – many of our rapidly growing users can prove that!

To build a MongoDB admin panel with Forest Admin, you need:

15 minutes of your time.
Basic knowledge of JavaScript.
Web browser (we recommend Chrome and Firefox).
Your favorite code editor.
A MongoDB database or an Express application with the Mongoose ORM.

Getting started with Forest Admin for MongoDB

First of all, sign up on ForestAdmin.com and create a free account and choose a name for your project. If you have a MongoDB database, there are 2 options:

Choose MongoDB if you have a MongoDB/MongoDB Atlas database. Forest Admin will create a Node.js server for you.
Then follow the onboarding instructions. You will be able to copy and paste the code when you log in to the app.

We recommend installing with npm. You will be able to copy and paste the code when you log in to the app.

Alternatively, choose Express/Mongoose if you have an Express application with the Mongoose ORM. Forest Admin will be installed directly into your app.

Then follow the onboarding instructions.

You will be able to copy and paste the code when you log in to the app. Read more about how to configure Express packages here. And if you need any assistance, the Forest Admin developer community forum is there to help.

Once you have your back office up and running, it is time to customize your admin panel, deploy to production, and invite team members because the more the merrier!

Try it yourself with our demo MongoDB database

We want to give you the possibility to try Forest Admin for MongoDB in a read-only mode in a few moments, even before you connect it to your own database. Use these demo credentials and follow the above-mentioned steps and see it for yourself how easy to set up and use are internal tools built in Forest Admin.

After creating a project, and picking MongoDB as a datasource, paste the following information and follow the instructions:

Host: prod-howtobuildamongodb.x4fxi.mongodb.net

User: article

Password: CAx3jRn%gx4Y3kts**VHBVYZRSx@

database: sample_analytics

And don’t forget to tick Use SRV in the advanced settings.

Then, follow the instructions like in the example above. We also recommend installing Forest Admin for MongoDB with npm.

That’s all! Now you can play around with Forest Admin in a read-only mode. The next step? Create a new project and build a MongoDB admin panel with your own data.

If you don’t have an account yet, sign up for free and join thousands of innovative companies.

How to build a Ruby on Rails admin panel

Monika Ambrozowicz — Mon, 29 Nov 2021 12:54:40 +0000

It is reliable, efficient, and supported by a massive community of developers. We are not surprised that Ruby on Rails is widely used by well-established companies like Shopify, Github, and Airbnb, and also numerous startups that develop their first MVPs. RoR is commonly praised for its efficiency, security, and scalability, making it particularly suitable for SaaS and e-commerce applications. Admittedly, such products need robust internal tools to manage orders and refunds, process customer claims, keep track of the inventory, and perform lots of other operations.

How to build a Ruby on Rails admin panel

If you are reading this, chances are you are a Ruby on Rails developer looking for an internal tool solution. The good news is that you have quite a few options:

Build your admin panel in-house. This option allows you to be the most flexible but it also has disadvantages. The most significant one? Well, on average, developers spend as much as 30% of their time building and maintaining internal tools. At Forest Admin, we are certain this is not the most efficient way to provide internal tools for companies.
Pick one of the open-source frameworks and libraries that are widely available. Choosing one of them is an easier option than building internal tools from scratch. However, they have limitations, and such internal tools can't be adjusted by non-technical staff members.
Choose an admin panel template, especially if you need a simple CRM or a dashboard. Templates are quite often well designed and available for free but their biggest disadvantage is that they’re almost non-customizable.
Go for a low-code solution that gives you the best of both worlds: ready-to-use but flexible UI and the ability to code custom features using Smart Views and Smart Actions. On top of that, you get dedicated support and top-class security.

Why choose Forest Admin as a Ruby on Rails admin panel

Whatever you choose, there is always some tradeoff, especially between efficiency of a template or another ready-to-use solution, and flexibility and scalability of the one created from scratch. A third-party internal tool software is the only middle ground that gives you the scalability and flexibility you need without hiring developers dedicated to internal tools and defocusing design and product teams.

Why is Forest Admin the perfect fit for Ruby on Rails applications?

We have launched the Ruby on Rails agent on Forest Admin because we wanted to give RoR developers a robust and comprehensive admin panel solution they can hook natively into their apps in a matter of minutes.

What makes Forest Admin special is the hybrid architecture that consists of four components: the database and admin backend, the Forest Admin API Server, and the Forest Admin UI Server. Once you create an account, and choose the Rails app as a data source, your admin backend will be generated in this app. The frontend, on the other hand, is managed on Forest Admin servers. It also means that Forest Admin API Server is never proxying requests to your database — the data is stored on your own server and never passes through Forest Admin servers. Such an architecture ensures top-level data security and also lets your non-technical staff edit their admin panel according to their needs.

Building a Ruby on Rails Admin Panel: Prerequisites

To build your Ruby on Rails admin panel with Forest Admin, you need:

15 minutes of your time.
A Ruby on Rails app.
A web browser (we recommend Chrome and Firefox).
Your favorite code editor.

Get started with Forest Admin

Create an account on ForestAdmin.com, you can start for free, and no credit card is required. Create either a personal project or an organization.

Then pick Ruby on Rails as your data source.

Set and verify your application URL. By default, it’s http://localhost:3000.

Add our gem to your application's Gemfile using the gem 'forest_liana' command.
Bundle it using the bundle install command.
Install the gem using the rails g forest_liana:install command — you'll need your environment key for this, which is provided in the onboarding experience in the first step of the in-app guide.
Restart your server using the rails s command.
For more details, check Forest Admin Installation Guide for Ruby on Rails.

After your project is up and running, an automated quick tour will guide you through the basic views and settings. Click on the blue circles whenever more information is needed.

Adjust your internal tool to suit your business logic. You will be amazed at how powerful the Layout editor is. Once you’re ready, Invite your team members. To facilitate their onboarding, use tags.

Are you looking for more details? These resources will help you get started:

Why you should use Ruby on Rails for your next product in 2021
Rails Migrations Tricks [Guide + Code] — Cheatsheet included
The most popular Ruby Gems in 2021
Forest Admin Documentation
Forest Admin Developer Forum, where you can ask questions
Live Demo of Forest Admin
A detailed description of Forest Admin architecture and its security level.
Case Studies

Would you like to try it for free? Sign up now.

What are internal tools? The ultimate guide to admin panels, database GUIs, CMSes, and internal tool templates

Monika Ambrozowicz — Thu, 25 Nov 2021 10:41:40 +0000

Internal tools are where businesses run their operations. I know - it sounds very broad but that’s because each organization’s needs can be very different, and internal tools are widely used to perform various actions such as keeping track of the inventory, processing customer claims, confirming bookings and refunds, collaborating internally, performing KYC processes, managing fleets, exporting data, visualizing dashboards… this could be a never-ending list.

Some of these operations are common, and solutions like CRMs, ticketing software, or popular Business Intelligence (BI) tools fit their needs. Others are so specific to one organization that ready-to-use solutions are not a good fit for them, and such organizations are more likely to build internal tools in-house. In the past, it used to be the case of 99% of them but third-party internal tool solutions like Forest Admin have changed the game.

What are internal tools?

Internal tools are often called back-office tools because, in contrast to the front-office, they are never visible to customers. Does it make them less important? Let’s stop here for a moment. Obviously, the customer-facing app is king, as apps and services are designed to address the customers’ problems. However, don’t make the mistake of thinking that customers are not impacted by the quality or the lack of internal tools. Without customer support tools, customers wouldn’t get their issues solved. Without KYC systems, financial services businesses wouldn’t be able to operate. Without analytical tools, product performance, retention, or growth wouldn’t be monitored.

As a customer, every time you easily get quick, precise solutions from a friendly staff, you can bet this staff is equipped with top-of-the-class internal tools. As a business, investing in efficient internal tools is one of the most effective ways to increase customer satisfaction and employee retention.

Internal Tool vs. Admin Panel

The terms internal tool and admin panel are frequently considered as synonyms and used interchangeably. However, it’s important to know that internal tools have a broader meaning — every admin panel is an internal tool but not every internal tool is an admin panel. The main difference is that admin panels are built on top of the application’s database whilst internal tools can be built on top of any type of data source, like a SaaS provider such a Stripe, Intercom, or Salesforce. Internal tools built on top of such data sources allow for enriching the data that typically isn’t stored in the app’s database: payment details, marketing campaigns, customer support conversations, and similar. Thanks to that, business team members can handle complex workflows without worrying about where the data is located.

Internal tools also often refer to small tools tackling specific use cases that fit the needs of one small team or even one person. The admin panel is used by the whole company to collaborate on shared data from multiple sources across all teams and operations from customer support to warehouse management and financial controller.

Internal Tool vs. CMS

CMS stands for Content Management System, and it is widely used to create, publish, organize, moderate, and delete a website’s content. WordPress, Webflow, and Ghost are among the most popular CMSes, and they all work in a way that users add or edit their content using an HTML editor, and the content is saved with the back-end in the database. Then, WordPress or another CMS shows the content based on the previously constructed front-end. They are monolithic in the sense they have all the functionalities included.

An interesting type of s CMS is a headless CMS, also called an API-first CMS. Such a system also gives the non-technical content editors the interface for managing content, but developers are free to choose their front-end technologies. Contentful, Sanity, ButterCMS, Content Stack, dotCMS, and Kontent by Kentico are popular content platforms and headless CMS solutions.

Similarily to an admin panel, every CMS is an internal tool but not every internal tool is a CMS. As its name states it, a Content Management System can only manage content, which makes it the perfect solution to manage a blog or another website that is rich in content. Its advanced text editor widgets, video-embedding, visual builders, and category management features will make it the easiest tool to write beautiful articles, create static pages or organize the content of a product catalog. However, they don’t have many useful functionalities of the all-in-one internal tools, and they can’t serve as a data centralization system. A CMS will not be of any help to organize the shipping, reimburse clients, visualize sales KPIs, moderate user-created content etc. Companies often use both a CMS and an admin panel to get the best of each tool.

Internal Tools vs. database GUI clients

Database Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) clients are simple interfaces built on top of the database that allow for performing CRUD operations. They’re far from being fully-functional internal tools but they allow to access the database and give full control over the data.

The biggest disadvantage of database GUI clients is that they can only be used by team members with technical expertise — we bet you wouldn’t like to give raw SQL access to your database to everyone in the organization. Another downside of database GUIs is that they don’t provide any dashboards to monitor growth and other metrics. However, if the need is to access data and to perform basic operations on it, and the lack of technical expertise is not an issue, database GUI clients, such as Postico, Sequel Pro for SQL, or Robo 3T and Studio 3T for MondoGB, can be a good choice.

Internal tools: Build vs. Buy

The big question everyone has to answer before making a decision in favor of any kind of an internal tool is whether to buy a ready-to-use solution or build it from scratch. In the past, almost every internal tool has been developed in-house, as other ways of having internal tools were simply not available.

At Forest Admin, we decided to do our own research and we surveyed early-stage companies in the fintech industry. Choosing fintechs was not a random decision — companies operating in this industry have to comply with strict regulations regarding data protection and preventing money laundering and fraud. It means such companies have to have internal tools ready from the first day of the launch and it is absolutely crucial for them to have all the data under control — the question is how they prefer to get it done.

Read the entire report: The state of admin panels in early-stage Fintech companies

Our survey showed an almost 50/50 split in answering the build vs. buy question.

What makes users choose the off-the-shelf solution then? First of all, building and maintaining internal tools takes on average up to 30% of development time. As development resources virtually always are the bottleneck of any tech company in 2021 (seriously, who has too many developers and not enough projects to develop ?), it is strategic to allocate these resources to building unique differenciating features on customer facing apps, not coding from scratch an authentication, CRUD, roles and permissions, and charts for internal needs. On top of that, internal tool developers and designers are difficult to hire - professionals involved in product management, design, and development in most cases prefer to work on customer-facing apps.

Respondents who were in favor of building internal tools in-house wanted to make sure the application is secure. However, this concern can be addressed by choosing the tool that was created with all of those in mind. For example, Forest Admin has a hybrid architecture thanks to which user data only transits through an admin backend hosted on the client's server, and its layout editor and smart features give a lot of flexibility for the internal tool to fit every specific needs of every business, as developers can introduce custom coded logic and views.

Off-the-shelf solutions like Forest Admin also tackle issues that most business owners are concerned about such as:

Data security. User data goes through the admin API hosted on your servers, right into your end-user browser interface. It remains completely invisible to Forest Admin servers.
Scalability. Forest Admin is built to scale with your application - it will handle the company’s growth from a few to thousands of employees.
User Experience. The UI of Forest Admin is aesthetic and intuitive. Not only your dev team but also product and design teams can focus on the customer-facing app knowing a third-party internal tool is user-friendly and professionally looking.

Where to find internal tools

Let’s say you’re now convinced to use third-party solutions instead of building your internal tool in-house, from scratch. How to choose the best one, then?

As I’ve already mentioned, there are different types of internal tools: from database GUIs and simple admin panel templates to all-in-one data centralization systems used by hundreds and even thousands of users from different teams. Finding the perfect solution depends largely on the size of the company, its business logic, and the needs of team members they are going to work with it. Here are a few options:

Admin panel templates — pre-built packages that allow for a quick start as they provide a ready-to-go admin panel in literally a few clicks. However, their simplicity is a double-edged sword as they don’t allow enough flexibility for projects that are even slightly more specific and complex. We have covered this topic already in the article that explains why you most likely need more than admin panel templates.
Open source internal tool solutions. Some web development technologies have internal tool solutions available out-of-the-box. For example, React has React Admin, Django - Django Admin, Ruby in Rails - Active Admin, Laravel has Laravel Nova, just to name a few most popular. They are ready to use, which is a significant advantage, just like the fact they’re well-integrated with their frameworks. However, they’re also limited in terms of functionalities and can’t be used for big projects with complex business logic. They also require coding skills to make even the smallest edits, which is not the case with third-party solutions with a WYSIWYG editor.
Off-the-shelf solutions like Forest Admin. I believe they give users the best of both worlds. For example, Forest Admin has plenty of out-of-the-box functionalities that don’t require any coding but it also gives developers a lot of independence and flexibility in building custom-made smart features that can fit even very specific business logic.

How to share internal tools with external partners

Although internal tools are meant to be used, well, internally, there are cases where they become even more powerful when at least some of their subsets are shared with external partners: suppliers, resellers, franchisees, even some clients. This allows them, for example, to get access to real-time data about stock levels, sales dashboards, some user data. At the same time, there are parts of the internal tool that should be restricted, so that external partners don’t have access to all the company data. Forest Admin is the only internal tool solution that offers it natively: our roles and permissions system has been designed to share subsets of an internal tool hassle-free.

Internal Tools: Summary

Although internal tools usually don’t get as much attention as the customer-facing apps, the consequences of neglecting them, like lower employee productivity and satisfaction, slower handling of customer tickets, or scaling difficulties are severe, and sooner or later, they will have a negative impact on the entire business. The good news, now there are more ways of getting custom-made and user-friendly internal tools without building and maintaining them in-house: from open-source templates to fully-functional third-party solutions.

If you’d like to give Forest Admin a try, sign up for free.

How to build a Node.js admin panel

Monika Ambrozowicz — Mon, 08 Nov 2021 09:19:58 +0000

What is great about Node.js is that it allows for building even complex applications that can handle a plethora of real-time data. In the last couple of years, many well-known established companies like Netflix, eBay, or Uber have rewritten their microservices using Node.js. LinkedIn, in turn, has successfully migrated a part of the code that has been written in Ruby on Rails to Node.js. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that robust applications need robust internal tools.

How to build a Node.js admin panel

Node.js doesn’t have a default admin panel solution like Django Admin for Django or Active Admin for Ruby on Rails. However, there are quite a few options for building an admin panel for a Node.js application:

Build all internal tools in-house from scratch. This option gives you the maximum flexibility but it also comes with disadvantages, like the fact that on average, developers spend up to 30% of their time on building and maintaining internal tools. At Forest Admin, we agree there are more efficient ways to equip companies with internal tools.
Take advantage of open-source admin frameworks and libraries. In contrast to building internal tools from scratch, it’s a quick and relatively easy option that comes with limitations and cannot be edited by non-technical team members.
Pick one of numerous and often free admin panel templates, especially when all you need is a simple dashboard or a CRM. Just keep in mind that you will face even more limitations compared to open source frameworks. They are designed to fit the most general applications and provide the essential features out-of-the-box, but there is usually too little customization available.
Choose a low-code solution that gives you the best of both worlds: an out-of-the-box solution, the possibility to code custom features with Smart Actions and Smart Views, dedicated support, and top-class security.

Why choose Forest Admin as a Node.js admin panel

As you can see, in most cases there is some tradeoff between the efficiency of a ready-to-use solution and the flexibility and scalability of the one built in-house. A custom-made internal tool is always designed to fit the needs of a specific organization and its business logic. There is one major problem, though. Building and maintaining it takes up to 30% of development time, requires a lot of effort, and defocuses design and product teams. At Forest Admin, we think that all this effort should rather be spent on a customer-facing shiny app but does it mean that internal tools can be neglected? On the contrary, that’s why we’ve built a highly-customizable and secure admin panel solution.

Why is Forest Admin the perfect fit for Node.js applications?

Forest Admin’s architecture consists of four components: the database, the admin backend, the Forest Admin API server, and the Forest Admin UI server. When you install Forest Admin, you can generate a Node.js application on your local machine that includes a RESTful API that connects to your database. It also provides the Forest Admin API Server with the information needed to build the User Interface. Another possibility is to install Forest Admin to an Express/Sequelize, or an Express/Mongoose app as your data source.

Such a special architecture makes it possible to achieve top-level security, as Forest Admin API Server is never proxying requests to your database. In short, Forest Admin never sees your data, and you are in full control of it. You own the admin backend and you can extend it like any Node.js app. Using JavaScript and npm packages, you can add any custom logic you want.

Are you ready to start?

Building a Node.js admin panel: Prerequisites

To build your internal tools with Forest Admin, you need:

15 minutes of your time.
Basic knowledge of JavaScript.
Web browser (we recommend Chrome and Firefox).
Your favorite code editor.
A database or another data source, for example an Express/Sequelize, or an Express/Mongoose app.

Getting started with Forest Admin

Create your account on ForestAdmin.com. You can get started for free. You will be asked to fill a sign-up form, choose whether it’s a personal project or you need to create an organization, and name your project.
You will be asked to fill a sign-up form, choose whether it’s a personal project or you need to create an organization, and name your project.

Once it’s done, it’s time to pick your data source.

Follow the onboarding instructions. For more information, check Forest Admin Installation Guide.
Once your project is working, an automated quick tour will walk you through the basic views and settings: click on the blue circles whenever you need more information.

Now, adjust your internal tool to fit your business logic. Check how powerful our Layout Editor is, and invite team members! Pro tip: Use tags to facilitate their onboarding.

If you don’t have an account yet, sign up for free and join thousands of innovative companies.

Top reasons to build an app based on microservices in Node.js

Monika Ambrozowicz — Thu, 28 Oct 2021 08:35:44 +0000

Take any popular web project and there is a good chance it has been built with Node.js. This tremendously popular JavaScript runtime environment is praised by developers for its flexibility and effectiveness. And as a matter of fact, exactly the same can be claimed about microservice architecture. What are the benefits of both, and why in most cases is it a good idea to build an application based on microservices in Node.js, especially a SaaS one? Let’s find out.

What is a microservice?

A microservice is a software design pattern, where a group of interconnected services builds the entire application, in contrast to the monolithic approach to software development, where the application is built as one unit. These services are responsible for one function, they’re loosely coupled, isolated from the others, and independently deployable. Thanks to that, microservices accelerate the development of complex software. It doesn’t mean they are always better, though. What are the pros and cons of microservices?

Benefits of microservices

Scalability. Maintaining a complex application in a large team is more efficient when the app is based on microservices because responsibilities can be easier shared between the developers.
More agile development process. Building applications based on microservices allow developers to focus on clearly defined modules, which makes development, testing, and maintenance more flexible and better optimized.
More efficient deployment. In contrast to the monolithic architecture, whenever a microservice needs to be updated, there is no need to deploy the entire application. The only requisite is to release REST-ful APIs for other services. Easier iterations. Developers can iterate over microservices separately, they’re not limited by the other components.
Language agnostic. Microservices can be written in different programming languages, which gives significant flexibility to the development of the entire app.

Disadvantages of microservices.

Difficult to manage the whole unit. The microservices architecture may be a double-edged sword. On one hand, it’s easier to maintain small units over one large and complex. However, whenever there is a need to manage an application as an entire unit, it’s more challenging with microservices.
Challenging testing. The same issue applies to testing - it seems to be more efficient to test each microservice separately, but in a monolithic app you can run end-to-end testing and find bugs faster.
More cross-cutting concerns. Logging in, cashing, and other concerns that affect the whole application are easier to handle in a monolithic architecture because there is only one application to take care of.
Multiple deployments. In monolithic applications, developers need to handle only one deployment, in contrast to microservices where there may be multiple. In some cases, it saves a significant amount of time and development work.

In general, the monolithic architecture is a better choice for lightweight products that don’t demand much business logic. Microservices, on the other hand, are the perfect choice for complex, evolving applications that are designed to scale. It is particularly true for SaaS products that today may have 1000 users, and tomorrow 100000, so they need to be ready to handle the exponential growth as users often pay month-by-month and require a highly available service. All of these are also the reason why SaaS developers choose to build their products with Node.js.

Microservices and Node.js: It’s a match!

As you already know, microservices are language agnostic, which is one of the strongest benefits of microservice architecture. At the same time, the connection between Node.js and microservices is particularly strong and deep. In fact, one of the ideas behind the creation of this environment was to make building applications based on microservices easier and more efficient. From a business perspective, taking advantage of both technologies has a significant impact on the product - not only in the creation phase but also later - in maintenance, and scaling. Let’s have a look at the top benefits of building an app based on microservices in Node.js.

More efficient cost control. Node.js and microservices are created to scale. Especially in SaaS products, it’s important to be able not only to handle growth but also to keep the cost of development and maintenance as low as possible. No monolithic architecture can achieve the same level of flexibility.
Higher performance and reliability. The argument above is also true when it comes to maintaining high performance: If one microservice is down because of a bug or another issue, it doesn’t affect the entire app. The fact that Node.js is one of the most popular web technologies also makes the difference here: With easier access to talent and online communities, it’s easier to ensure the top performance of an app.

It is safe to say that Node.js and microservices were made for each other. Node’s single-threaded asynchronous architecture facilitates scaling the app, and it comes with many frameworks, such as Express, that are heavily adopted by SaaS developers. On the other hand, microservices allow for rapid development and flexibility that would be impossible to achieve with a monolithic architecture. At Forest Admin, we’re not surprised that thousands of our users connected our internal tool solution with their various applications that have two things in common: Node.js and microservices.

Would you like to join them? Try Forest Admin for free. 🌲🌲🌲

Building microservices with Node.js: Useful resources

Are you convinced that Node.js and microservices are the best fit for your application but do you need some help with the implementation? We’ve gathered some tutorials and other resources to make your life easier.

How to build a microservices architecture with Node.Js to achieve scale? - Cue Logic

The Complete Microservice Tutorial — Building User Service With GRPC, Node.JS, and MongoDB - MD Ahad Hasan
Node Microservices: From Zero to Hero - Nickolas Fisher, Octa Developer
How to Build Microservices with Node.js - Archita Nayak, Happy Bhesdadiya, Bacancy Technology
Step-by-Step Guide To Create Microservices With Node.js - Back4App

Forest Admin: Django Admin Alternative

Monika Ambrozowicz — Mon, 18 Oct 2021 14:07:14 +0000

Internal tools are the gateway between products and users despite remaining hidden to the latter. Admin panels, dashboards, and other tools allow administrators to solve customer problems, perform various operations, edit and publish content, ensure data security, and much more.

As they are so important, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that on average, developers spend more than 30% of their time building internal tools, assuming they code everything from scratch. Is it the most efficient way? At Forest Admin we don’t think so as we have witnessed multiple times that an off-the-shelf solution proves to be much more effective. And it’s safe to say that the creators of Django Admin would agree with us, as, quoting the philosophy behind this automatically generated internal tool solution for Django applications:

Generating admin sites for your staff or clients to add, change, and delete content is tedious work that doesn’t require much creativity. For that reason, Django entirely automates creation of admin interfaces for models.

About Django Admin

Django was created in a newsroom environment at the Lawrence Journal-World newspaper, and giving site managers the ability to add, edit, and manage content in a way that is easy and as much automated as possible was the priority of its creators. That’s why, they equip the high-level Python web framework with a built-in admin interface that allows for basic CRUD operations, authenticating users, handling forms, managing content, and performing other tasks that are typical for admin panels. Once set up, Django Admin can be widely customized but Django doesn’t recommend using it above the basic organization’s internal management system.

Forest Admin: An alternative to Django Admin

Django Admin is not the only internal tool solution for applications developed in Django. At Forest Admin, we have recently released a Django agent that joins the growing list of data sources that are compatible with Forest Admin, including Ruby on Rails, Node.js, Stripe, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, and Microsoft SQL Server.

As a quick reminder, Forest Admin’s architecture is based on API. It consists of four components: the database, the admin backend, the Forest Admin API server, and the Forest Admin UI server. Users’ data is only hosted on their end and the user browser, it never transits through Forest Admin servers. That way, you don’t have to choose between the security and convenience of a SaaS tool - you have both.

To start, you can either generate a Node.js application on your local machine that includes a RESTful API that connects to your database or install Forest Admin using data sources mentioned above, including Django.

Check our new open-source Django Agent repository on GitHub and give it a star ⭐ if you like this new Forest Admin project.

Django Admin vs. Forest Admin

Both Django Admin and Forest Admin can be used as ready-to-use internal tool solutions. Django Admin is automatically generated, and Forest Admin can be easily connected to any application. However, both solutions differ in terms of functionalities, UI, security, and other aspects. Let us have a closer look at them.

Technical Aspects

Architecture

Forest Admin: API-based. The UI fetches the data from an API connected to the data source.
Django Admin: Server-side rendering application.

SaaS/On-premises

Forest Admin: SaaS UI
Django Admin: On-premises

Open Source

Forest Admin: Yes
Django Admin: Yes

Setup

Requirements

Forest Admin: A Django backend application if you want to use the Django agent. For other tech stacks, you either need a database (PostgreSQL, MySQL, MicrosoftSQL, MongoDB) or another natively supported backend technology: Ruby on Rails, Node.js Express/Sequelize and Node.js Express/Mongoose.
Django Admin: A Django backend application.

Onboarding

Forest Admin: Easy in-app onboarding.
Django Admin: Watch the installation video.

Layout:

Visual Builder:

Forest Admin: Yes, with a robust Layout Editor, a no-code visual builder.

Forest Admin UI. Source: Forest Admin Live Demo.

Django Admin: No, you need to code the UI customization.

The default Django Admin UI. Source: Django Admin documentation.

CRUD + Pagination

Forest Admin: Out of the box. Forest Admin UI. Source: Forest Admin Live Demo.

Search and Filtering

Forest Admin: Out of the box. Forest Admin UI. Source: Forest Admin Live Demo.
Django Admin: Requires UI definition in your Django application.

###Segments

Forest Admin: Out of the box.
Django Admin: Requires a detailed definition in your Django application using the filters.

Themes

Forest Admin: Dark and light themes available. The dark mode of the Forest Admin UI. Source: Forest Admin Live Demo.
Django Admin: Dark and light themes available, style fully customizable with CSS.

Data connectivity

ORMs

Forest Admin: Django ORM
Django Admin: Django ORM

SaaS API

Forest Admin: Forest Admin provides native integrations to and it's simple to add more through the Smart Features.
Django Admin: Requires implementing a "facade" to retrieve and edit the 3rd party data.

Security

Permissions

Forest Admin: Real RBAC system with Roles and Teams, provided out of the box, configurable in the UI. The API is automatically protected according to the configured permissions. These permissions can then be fully delegated to the Operations Manager or Product Manager. SSO available.
Django Admin: Django comes with a built-in permissions system. It provides a way to assign permissions to specific users and groups of users. More info available here in the Django Admin documentation.

Authentication

Forest Admin: User/Password, Google Login, SAML-based SSO for Organisations. Forest Admin login page
Django Admin: User/Password.

Two-factor authentication

Forest Admin: Enforced 2FA out of the box.
Django Admin: Not out of the box, probably possible via custom implementation.

Auto Logout

Forest Admin: Out of the box.
Django Admin: Not out of the box, probably possible via custom implementation.

Resources

Forest Admin: Documentation, Live Demo, GitHub.
Django Admin: Documentation.

When Django Admin may be a better fit for your project

You have a simple service managed by a small team, and basic CRUD functionalities are all you need. In such a case, Django Admin doesn’t have advantages over Forest Admin but this free open-source solution may just fit your needs.
You don’t need dashboards or modern and frequently updated UI with WYSIWYG layout editor for non-technical team members.

When you should choose Forest Admin

You need a robust internal tool that goes beyond basic CRUD operations and offers advanced functionalities such as an invitation system with transactional emails, multiple layouts for different teams, permissions per custom actions, dynamic forms per custom actions, actions approvals, notes and annotations on records, scoped data based on the user, and more.
You need a highly secure solution that helps you ensure compliance with regulations like GDPR. You want both user-friendliness of a SaaS product but you can’t compromise security. Forest Admin offers enforced 2FA and the enterprise-grade SSO. Thanks to its unique architecture, users’ data is only hosted on their end and the user browser, it never transits through Forest Admin servers.
You need a flexible tool that grows with your company and that can be used and managed by thousands of users, also from non-technical teams like sales or customer support that need a user-friendly WYSIWYG editor.

Django Admin vs. Forest Admin: Conclusion

Now, you should have learned enough about both solutions in order to make an informed decision. If you feel like you need more time, answering these questions should steer you to the right direction.

❓ What is the size of my project, and how many people from my team are going to use internal tools?

❓ Do my team members need a WYSIWYG editor or do all of them have tech skills and time to work on internal tools?

❓ Do I need basic CRUD operations or more advanced features?

❓ Will the internal tool scale together with my product and users?

❓ Can I easily find support and documentation if any issues arise?

If you decide to give Forest Admin a try, sign up for free. 🌲🌲🌲 Please keep in mind that our Django agent is currently in beta and we’ll appreciate your feedback!