Hey Product Hunt,
I'm Adrian, an indie developer and creator of Avo. For more than ten years, I built countless admin panels and back-offices for all types of apps. After a while, you start noticing patterns and extracting functionality to make the job easier. Together with my brother David I took those patterns and applied them to Avo.
Now, in just an hour, a developer can build production-ready applications that, with traditional coding techniques take a few days if not weeks.
Avo is suited to:
- agencies that build a lot of products for their clients and need to move fast and have a beautiful and robust UI
- indie developers trying to test out their ideas fast
- technical teams in companies of all sizes that need to build internal tools based on Ruby
- start-ups with a lot of ideas in need of validation
Avo runs on top of Ruby on Rails, which in itself is a powerhouse of a framework and uses the most modern tech stack (Hotwire, TailwindCSS, esbuild, view_component).
Avo has three main parts that you can choose from:
1. The CRUD UI
2. The Dashboard UI
3. The custom content
The CRUD UI is not something generated that takes maintenance in the long run. Instead, it's a familiar Ruby DSL that's easy to extend with Rails code if you need to break away from it.
It features about 30 fields with more advanced ones like (one-liner) file uploads, WYSIWYG, and key-value fields.
The Dashboards are a light layer on top of chartkick where one can query the data from the DB or an endpoint and quickly show the data in metrics, charts, or custom partials.
The Custom Content part is the secret sauce of Avo. It enables the developer to extend it even further using regular Rails code. You get access to partials, controller, action, params, and anything else you need to bring your own logic into the UI on every level (field, resource, tool).
Avo has a free Community version that features the powerful CRUD UI, and a paid Pro version for those who need more power and custom content. We also provide technical support for enterprise-like customers.
The product you build with Avo is not meant to be this obscure admin panel that only some team members go to in order to update some records, but the actual customer-facing app that you'll present to your users.
TBH, I believe Avo is the secret weapon in any developer's and agency's toolbox.
I'm here to answer all of your questions.
Thank you ✌️
Hi @adrianthedev,
Curious how you would differntiate Avo from products like jumpstartrails.com and bullettrain.co (which is also open source). I'm not a rails dev, but am eyeing turning one of my no code web apps into a rails app in the long run and am always interested in solid starting points for rails apps to be built and maintained by small teams.
-William
Hey @william_barber.
Great question! We have Jumpstart rails (JMS) and bullettrain (BUL) on one side and Avo on the other side. They are complementary products. JMS and BUL gives you a powerful starter kit with accounts, notifications, authentication set up and other goodies. Avo takes the developers from that point to the next milestone. Building the app.
With pretty simple configuration, a developer can build the back-office of the app in a very short while compared to traditional development techniques.
So it's more like low-code.
Our customers are pretty stoked with the results. You can check out some testimonials on https://avohq.io/testimonials
@william_barber@adrianthedev Hey William, author of Bullet Train here! Just wanted the confirm what Adrian said: the products are completely complimentary. We've specifically never shipped a default administration/back-office panel library in Bullet Train because it still felt like there was a lot of opportunity for competition in this particular space. Could not be more excited to see Avo emerge with a fresh take on this portion of development in the Rails ecosystem!
Thank you for the kind words @andrewculver. We know we have a tough challenge ahead of us.
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@adrianthedev@andrewculver Awesome, makes me even more excited for going a rails direction with things in the future. Thanks for the prompt commentary for both of you, love the products and it's helpful to hear it from both sides.
Random roadmap thought for @andrewculver while I have your attention - one of my pet projects has some tricky micropayments hurdles (and I'm skeptical/not currently willing to invest tech resources in crypto/web3) but FedNow is in theory going to be released in early 2023 and would be a big game changer for smaller devs (instant ach transfer style payments with no fee for the merchant at least domestically in the US). Stripe and others will likely incorporate it (but for the usual fee) it's exactly the kind of thing I'd love to see in bullettrain :)
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Avo is legit.
I'm a new user but already I feel empowered by it's breadth of tooling and flexibility to automagically slide in as a powerful Admin with very little configuration. It'll save me hundreds of hours of work for my app.
I like the licensing scheme. Open-source community or paid for power users. Very accessible.
I love the quick release cycle. Very active!
Docs and videos are helpful and very easy to read.
Adrian and his group have done a superb job getting the word out in the Rails community.
I look forward to seeing its success in the future.
Excellent product!!!
@graham_schmidt "Avo is legit". That's the best compliment we've ever received!
Thank you for the kind words! This is only the begining.
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Avo is the first well documented admin gem that is able to deal with all types of objects provided by active record, including polymorphic models and direct upload for cloud storage providers.
Thank you for this wonderful product. We use it to build an admin first rails plattform that can bei fully managed by our non tech team. What a great experience!
@paul_werther thank you for the kind words and for believing in the product from its infancy 💪
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I've been following Avo closely and have interacted with @adrianthedev multiple times in regards to Avo so heres what I can tell you:
Avo is is a gem! (pun intended) which I wish I had access to when I working at an agency - it would have saved so much time and money. I used other admin frameworks and I always found something missing because they seamed build by people without product background or they looked cool but were not well supported.
The community edition gets you very far, and the buy-or-build factor of the value of the pro version makes it a no brainer to upgrade, and if you have more apps negotiate a deal
10/10
@jcsrb Thank you Jakob! I have to say that your counsel and incredibly useful advice made Avo a better product. It wouldn't be the same without your help!
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Hi,
Congrats on building such a powerful tool!
I was wondering how far it can go when it comes to customization. Due to recent experiences, I have avoided using tools that limit my ability to customize fields in tables according to my needs.
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