As a much stronger backend/java developer, im absolutely in love with Bubble and the no code concept. I love this product. Why isn’t it much more popular?
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silly brand name
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yes but are they all active?
Speed of development is thrown back but the speed of apps in operation.
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When I pitch Bubble to folks, these are the things that come up:
- Vendor lock-in. I don’t ever get access to my source code.
- No native mobile support
- Performance
- Can’t self-host
I’m not saying they’re good excuses, but this is what I hear from skeptics or people who try it and decide it isn’t for them.
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Hopefully one day Bubble team decides to OS the code(without the PAAS part) so 1 and 4 are covered while they keep monetising the PAAS service they provide.
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Some valid points raised in the posts above.
I also find the Bubble homepage (and general site design if I’m honest) a bit uninspiring, especially if I wasn’t aware of the capabilities of the platform. The homepage doesn’t really provide a demo, visually, of whats possible, apart from you can add, drag and resize elements. It could do with a more feature rich video, couples of mins long to run through the features on offer.
I realise its something minor, but you know what they say, first impressions count. I believe before the re-design they had the Twitter clone site/video and although it was in a way just a tech demo, I feel it did capture peoples attention, added some intrigue and think of the possibilities…
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You also have to take into account that maybe Bubble doesn’t want to grow out of scale at the moment as it could impact negatively their support and future roadmap.
Maybe they are happy with the rate of growth which seems healthy at least on the revenue side. There are more KPI that are unknown to us but at least revenue is covered.
Source: Bubble on Indie Hackers
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I think this the bubble team is tactical about growth. They are slowly yet adequately growing. They have not raised venture capital money which means they are content with their current pace. We are In LOVE with the product so I get why you as such question.
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I agree, i saw all these points come up in one way or another in here and in another places,
But, native mobile support & Performance, these two points are the most important points at the moment for Bubble in my opinion.
While it is true that you dont have access to Source-code but database is accessible by API if one wants it , so i think this shouldn’t be a big problem for most people, also Can’t self-host is not a big problem for many people since you need to host it anyways.
When i say it is not a big problem, i mean that one can sacrifice these features easily if you give me a native mobile support & solid and reliable performance.
Sometimes when I’m developing on Bubble, I stop and I think, "this whole platform is bootstrapped!! " unreal, shows you how good Bubble founders/team is.
I’m not an expert, but i dont understand why Bubble team won’t raise money for faster growth now, they have been in the market for almost 4 years now, plus they have a huge number of paying customers (surely they have found a market fit) , I don’t know if they are profitable, but it doesn’t matter because this is a huge success for a company that didn’t raise money yet in my book, I have no doubt that investors will gladly invest in Bubble blindly.
The market is changing fast, so many “no-code” tools are coming and going fast, and people are actually starting to notice this, in my opinion there is no solid competitor to Bubble in the market so far, in fact Bubble is way ahead of them, and I don’t get why people don’t realize this (hence this topic, in fact i feel it is an insult to Bubble that it competes with other platforms like carrd), but I’m worried if this state will stay the same for long.
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Loss of control. I am pretty glad that they haven’t raised money. Hope it stays that way. The best way to raise money is from your users by providing a good product that they are willing to pay for.
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I am a HUGE Bubble fan, I recommend to everyone, built a site to help others get involved and use it for all my projects.
But I have to say I do think as trivial as it seems the name is quite a blocker.
Just my thoughts 
Paul
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We can chatter away, but we actually don’t know how they’ve pursued investment, or what the future holds.
I do think they are being tactical in their growth, taking on certain problems before others. For me, this is one key reason, in addition to the incredible robustness of the platform, why I am a strong advocate and have invested my time.
It’s my bet (and all serious endeavors are a bet) that the things I am building won’t grow faster or run up against walls before the platform expands.
Performance is non-negotiable. This has to constantly improve because they need their customer’s success tories to be their story, and (most often) this entails volume, which functionally means the server better be mighty quick.
For me, mobile is second. But I also would welcome a name change or rebranding.
But not to end on a negative note … Bubble.is is an excellent platform, and I think the future is bright.
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For Performance, there’s three thing to consider: Bubble itself, Plans and Design. You can manage 2 of 3 part. There’s of lot of performance issue that are just bad design. You can get more performance if you choose a higher plan. Remain Bubble to work on improvment 
You need to consider that the pricing structure cannot really provide a source code. Imagine: you can create app in a week, you buy the higher plan for only a month and that let you download the source code… for 445$! This doesn’t make sense for them to allow this and I agree. But the data should be easier to access (full download)
For me, there’s some more thing that I think bubble need to review.
- More File storage on higher plan.
- Make a big consideration on PWA over native. There’s some solution that can let you create native app like Bubble do (Thunkable for example) and both can connect. A lot of people consider PWA the future. I agree.
I’d love it if the data could be housed with a cloud provider so we could use some industrial grade tools on the backend. I’m talking the native data, not an external database though the API connector. If I want to write a dumb stored procedure that joins together every table and churns away for 20 minutes before some process kills it I’d prefer to get a bill from AWS instead of Bubble. Let Bubble provide tooling for UI, workflows, API design, responsiveness – and give me the option of doing some industrial strength manipulation of data without ‘Schedule API on List’ (which I have a love/hate relationship with, I’ll admit). An advanced or fully hosted plan that includes the above would be much prized. For me anyway.
For the folks I’ve talked to, it’s less about being able to take the code and run with it and more about being able to modify the guts themselves. I work with a ton of high-powered software engineers, and currently, Bubble excludes them from the workflow of app creation. I don’t doubt some people would want to take the source code and run, I just want the ability to use the talent at my disposal to make the application better, and you can only do that with modifications to the underlying code.
All that being said, I’ve been a Bubble customer for 3 years and don’t plan on leaving anytime soon. As the tech evolves, more and more of these issues will be addressed.
I have to disagree with anyone who thinks that the brand name is an issue, it is not, the brand name is what you do with it, or how you present it to the market. ( for the record i really like the name “Bubble” )
It is a marketing problem.
Maybe Bubble team need to double down on content marketing, blogs, tutorials, videos, webinars, courses, at the moment these are mostly generated by users (the good ones are paid).
Also there is a learning curve to Bubble for new users, I went through it myself, the current interactive lessons is not enough, i had to pay for a course to understand the platform thoroughly,
maybe if Bubble create some free templates that allow new users to start tweaking it to their needs with also better tutorials will help with this painful learning process at the start? Maybe, I don’t know.
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Personally, I think Bubble makes it too gimmicky, like Wix or Weebly - it puts it on the same ‘basic drag and drop builder’ level, which it really isn’t. It really is a full programming language in a way, and I think it needs a more ‘respectable’ brand name, similar to other powerful frameworks out there. Something that doesn’t make me cringe saying it to my developer friends. Its essentially a Node.js application - why not play off of that
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I agree that the marketing and branding side could be improved to help make the platform more popular. But like someone else brought up, they probably do not want a large influx of users and are happy with steady growth for now, so I’m guessing that marketing/branding hasn’t been a major focus for the team. Agreed that the name sounds too light and playful and doesn’t fully represent the power of the platform.
I have always agreed with their stance on not taking on investment money, but now with a lot of non-traditional VC’s investing in companies I think there is a good opportunity for Bubble to raise money and maintain full control. Plus get mentoring from successful Bootstrappers and an injection of money for new employees to speed up product improvement and marketing. Investors like TinySeed and others are happy to invest in profitable and stable companies without the expectations and pressure that traditional VC money brings
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