Rapid prototyping front end tool for Strapi backend

Hello everybody

With friends, I am developing a project that we hope to use in social science research at some point. Thanks to Strapi we were able to implement the backend in a very short time and we were especially enthusiastic about how easy it is to customize Strapi to our own needs.
Among us there is unfortunately no one who has flair for frontend development and I am the most competent in this area and I am not competent at all :slight_smile:
At the moment I’m working with Svelte, which I like much more than Vue or Angluar because it stays close to vanilla javascript from the syntax and I like the approach of Svelte.
Even though Svelte is great, I don’t enjoy the work very much.
For this reason, I’ve been looking for a suitable tool for quite some time that allows me to develop web frontends quickly and easily and connect them to my Strapi backend. Just as Strapi takes an enormous amount of work off the backend, I hope that there are similar solutions on the frontend.
I already know the common CSS frameworks, Webflow sounds interesting, however I have reservations there because I can’t export the generated code and then customize it independently. I have already looked at Bootstrap Studio, but I don’t know if this tool is flexible enough. Also, I don’t only want to create the design (but the design is of course also super important and if someone has tips I would be very grateful), but I would also like to integrate CRUD operations with the Strapi backend without much boilerplate. I’m a bit worn down by creating the same web form mechanisms with javascript again and again and would be happy if a tool would simplify some of this work.
Any tips or advice on how to make my life easier on the frontend would be so much appreciated.

Merci :slight_smile:

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I feel like you’re looking for an Appsmith or a Budibase. Those two are open source. There are other non-free/non-open source tools such as Retool, etc. Appsmith also supports graphql.

Cheers

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Very interesting suggestions, thank you. I’ve already stumbled across Appsmith, but based on the demos and description, I felt that Appsmith and similar services are not flexible enough for our needs. My goal would be to develop a working prototype for end users.
Appsmith is something I will take a closer look at to see what I can do with it :slight_smile:
A tool I find very interesting is Flutterflow (https://flutterflow.io/), as I can create really good prototypes with it and already implement some logic and when I reach the limits I can export the code and make adjustments. Since we know that we only need a webapp and I don’t know Flutter enough and I’m afraid that it’s not very mature for webapps yet, I’ve ruled out Flutterflow for me so far. If there was something similar for the web that would be fantastic. But I’m interested in any front-end tools that users here like to use along with Strapi (beside the obvious CSS and Javascript frameworks I already know :)).

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Funny you mention Flutter since I’ve experimented around with it a lot in the past. I loved how easy it enabled me to develop native apps for ios/android using the same codebase. If your users are mainly on ios/android and you’ve created a flutter app for them, then it would make sense to use flutter-web for the small number of your users. But I definitely wouldn’t recommend flutter-web (yet) if all or most of your users are on web. It doesn’t compare to the more mature web frameworks as it’s missing features and the performance is lacking (ex: scrolling, text selection). I really hope that changes in the future though.

As for Flutterflow I was playing around with it a few days ago to see how viable it is to use it for production. My main issue with it was that I couldn’t find anyone who has used it in production. I needed to know what to expect and how much refactoring I would need to do. To be fair though, I really liked how easy it easy it was to prototype the app design with it, which is the part I hate the most when developing.

What features in Appsmith/Budicase are missing? I’m planning to use one of them for my current project and curious to see if I missed something :upside_down_face:. Anyways there’s also jetadmin, they seem to highlight their support for external users/client portals.

Flutter development is smooth :slight_smile:

I will try appsmith and provide an update regarding the experience but I need atleast a week.

I have now looked into Budibase a little more and the tool is absolutely great from my point of view. However, the bummer for me is that the focus is really on developing internal tools for companies and their employees. And what I definitely don’t want is to use a tool that is not designed for my needs. I’d rather stick with Svelte, especially since these projects are still relatively young and there are few resources on how to interact with external REST APIs, etc.

I would be happy about further suggestions :slight_smile:

A prototype might be anything from a detailed drawing on paper to a fully functional product. As a result, prototype development is only a set of procedures used by the manufacturer to create the prototype. Prototype development is also known as prototype manufacturing by some.

I don’t understand what you are trying to say here: I am looking for inputs regarding lowcode tools that allow me to build drag and drop user interfaces for endusers that allow me to incorporate Strapi backends (content types, authentication, etc.).

Budibase, Appsmith and co are not useful for my usecase as they are focused on internal company applications. I did evaluate Webflow and Bubble but only superficial. Every feedback is much appreciated, thanks.