[LRUG] Experiences using RailsAdmin vs ActiveAdmin

[Chris Adams]

Hi all,

Hoping I can tap into the LRUG hive mind here, with a question others
might find useful too - apologies if it's come up already in the last
couple of months.

We're developing a project at work which looks like it'll need some
kind of admin-dashboard for privileged users to sign in and see
various in-app metrics, like how many users are in the system, or how
many performed a specific action, and so on.

Now, my preferred approach here I would be to look at which gems I
could use as a starting point for something like this - and the two
best options look to be either ActiveAdmin, and RailsAdmin.

They both give nice looking admin interfaces, without needing to go
spelunking through loads of code to deliver useful features, but I'd
love to hear which ones you guys have used in your own projects.

Reading this post here suggests that ActiveAdmin may be a better
choice in the long run on projects where you can't predict what a
product owner would want to measure.

http://batsov.com/articles/2011/11/20/admin-interfaces-for-rails-apps-railsadmin-vs-activeadmin/

For my part, I've used RailsAdmin on a couple of projects, pretty much
using it out of the box, and I've been amazed at how much you get for
free, but pages like this when trying to understand the structure of
the project make me wary about trying to customise it:

https://github.com/sferik/rails_admin/wiki/Code-Architecture-For-Contributors

How about you guys?

Have you had good experiences building your own dashboards in RailsAdmin?

Or if I'm about to invest a chunk of time building a dashboard where
I'll most likely add my own screens, is it a better idea to just dive
into ActiveAdmin instead?

Ta

Chris

-- 
Chris Adams
mob: 07974 368 229
tel: 0207 558 8971
skype: chris.d.adams
twitter: mrchrisadams