Three platforms, three different playing fields. The choice hinges on a single starting criterion, and the next two only serve to break the tie.

The question almost always arrives too early. As long as the product’s scope is not written down, comparing these three tools amounts to comparing feature lists, which settles nothing. Once the scope is known, the decision takes ten minutes.

The criterion that decides before all the others

Does your product live in a browser or on a phone? It is not a question of preference, it is a question of real use.

A tool handled sitting in front of a screen, with lists, filters, long data entry and exports, lives in a browser. A tool taken out of a pocket on a site, in a corridor or in a van, with photos, location and notifications, lives on a phone.

Plenty of projects want both. At the first-version stage, wanting both is the surest way to fail at both: the budget splits and each version arrives half finished. You have to choose, knowing that the second platform is not condemned, it is postponed.

Bubble: when the data is the subject

Bubble is a web application builder. Its strength is the data model: types linked to each other, permissions by role, filtered views, cross-searches. It is the ground of internal business tools, marketplaces and anything handling lists.

Its counterpart is a real learning curve. The interface exposes a great deal, and a product built without discipline quickly becomes unreadable to anybody but its author. That is not a flaw in the tool, it is the consequence of its flexibility.

The signal that rules it out: if your main use assumes the camera, continuous geolocation or working offline, you will be fighting the tool.

FlutterFlow: when the phone is the subject

FlutterFlow produces a mobile application installed from the app stores. It gives access to what the phone can do natively, and that is exactly what is asked of it.

In exchange it means dealing with the constraints of the app stores: a publication process, review rules, and delays that do not depend on you. On a first version, that point is often discovered too late, and it weighs on the timetable.

Another structural difference: business logic is less centralised there than in a web builder. A product whose core is a set of complex management rules can be built there, but more laboriously.

Adalo: when simplicity comes before everything else

Adalo aims at getting going quickly, with a deliberately reduced interface. On a simple product, a list, some records, a form, a few screens, it does the job faster than the other two.

Its limit is its quality: what has been taken out of the interface has also been taken out of the possibilities. As soon as the data model branches, as soon as permissions grow complex, as soon as the number of rows climbs, you reach the edge of the tool sooner than elsewhere.

It is only a bad choice if you are wrong about the trajectory. For a product that will stay simple, it is the shortest path. For a product that has to grow, it is a detour.

What the three share, and their common ceiling

None of these platforms has intrinsic quality: they make building well as easy as building badly, simply faster in both cases. What separates a product that will hold from a product to be redone comes down to three things, invisible on screen.

  • A data model thought through before the first page, because it is the only element that can no longer be corrected without starting over.
  • Permissions handled at the data level and not at the display level: a hidden button is not a protection.
  • A naming scheme kept up, so that whoever picks the product up in a year understands what they are looking at.

They also share a ceiling, and it arrives with success rather than at the start: display times on screens handling many rows, a compliance requirement the platform cannot satisfy, a cost indexed on usage that becomes comparable to that of a team, or business logic specific enough that more time goes on working around the tool than on using it.

And the AI-assisted generators?

They produce a credible interface in a few hours, which is a real gain for showing a direction. Their limit appears when what has been generated has to evolve: the data model is often implicit and the logic scattered, so that taking it over costs more than the build saved. We set out what each can do in Bolt or Lovable.

What one of these platforms really costs

We do not publish figures here: the price lists change too often to stay accurate, and a wrong price in a comparison discredits the rest of the page. The mechanics, on the other hand, are stable and enough to decide on.

All three bill a subscription by tier, and the tier depends on usage rather than on the number of screens built. The consequence is counter-intuitive: the most expensive product is not the most complex one, it is the most used one. That is good news at the start, where the cost stays low, and a point to watch once it succeeds.

On top of that subscription come two lines almost nobody budgets for.

Design time, which is one-off and represents most of the cost of a first version. It is human work, it depends on no platform, and it does not fall because you chose the simplest tool.

Maintenance time, which is recurring and systematically underestimated. Somebody has to fix what breaks, adapt the product when a connected service changes its interface, and deal with user requests. It is that line that decides the real return, not the subscription.

One last cost appears on no invoice: dependence. A product only one person knows how to develop costs dearly on the day that person is no longer available. That is why we check from the start that the data can be exported in a readable format, and why we document the business logic in plain language, outside the tool.

How we decide, in practice

In this order, and never before the scope has been written down.

  • The platform of real use, which already eliminates one of the three.
  • The complexity of the data model, which separates the remaining two in almost every case.
  • Who will maintain the product after us, which settles the rare situations where the first two criteria leave the choice open.

The third is the one people forget and the one that costs most when forgotten. A product only one person knows how to develop is a dependency, not an asset. The full approach is described on the application development page.