In the landscape of no-code development, Bubble has long been the reigning monarch for given its long history and powerful features. Recently, Momen was launched on Product Hunt, and was voted as #1 product of the day on Nov 17th. They both aim at solving the same issue: enabling rapid application development without traditional coding. While both platforms target similar audiences - ambitious but potentially non-technical founders - their philosophical and technical approaches differ significantly.
Philosophical differences
Bubble: Reinventing Development for Accessibility
Bubble has taken a bold approach by reimagining many traditional development concepts. Their philosophy centers on making web development more accessible, even at the cost of potentially alienating users with partial industry experience (designers) and rendering bubble skills less transferrable by departing from industry standards. This is evident in their custom terminology - for instance, referring to database rows as "things" - and their NoSQL-like approach to data management, despite using PostgreSQL under the hood. Its prioritizes ease of comprehension over standard compliance or higher upper limits of capability.
Momen: Bridging the Code/No-Code Divide
Momen rejects what they see as a false dichotomy between code and no-code development. Instead, it embrace industry-standard practices and terminology, believing that fundamental software development principles - such as fail-fast approaches, quick feedback loops, and DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) - remain valuable regardless of the development method. This philosophy manifests in its more direct exposure of PostgreSQL capabilities and their use of familiar industry terms and patterns.
Best Use Cases
When to Choose Bubble
1. Team-Based Development
Teams benefit from Bubble's more robust collaboration features, especially Git-like branching and merging capabilities. A clear staging/production separation is also essential for rapid iteration while keeping production stable. These features work in concert to enable teams of developers follow a development process similar to what has been proven to work in the traditional software engineering world.
2. Mobile-First Projects
Bubble has iOS and Android support as of this writing. While support for both platforms are still in beta, missing integration of many native functionalities, their react native-based implementation should be quite solid when it emerges from beta. Given the similarities between web and react native, Bubble's solution should be quite accessible to their existing user and be no more difficult than their web offering to new users.
When to Choose Momen
1. Data-Intensive Applications
Momen has an architectural emphasis on database performance. A project built on Momen can process up to 5000 rows per second compared to Bubble's 100. Its native PostgreSQL integration provides ACID compliance in multi-step Actionflows (Momen's name for backend workflows) and access to lower level primitives such as constraints (foreign keys, unique, non-null, etc...), making it ideal for applications requiring strong data consistency.
2. API-First Projects
Projects needing to be integrated by other systems benefit from Momen's out-of-the-box GraphQL APIs and comprehensive permission system. GraphQL's introspection API enables developers to easily comprehend the functionality of the API while its permission system supporting both RBAC and ABAC gives fine grained control on every piece of data / functionality, making it well-suited for API-centric architectures.
3. Projects needing more Developer Control
Momen caters to projects that need to be run on specific environment (e.g. Designated geographical region, on-premises) with bring-your-own-cloud deployment options. Native React component support enables custom development when needed, while maintaining no-code accessibility. Existence of Javascript code blocks in Actionflow allows easy integration of custom logic that may be cumbersome to express visually. Extensive logging support for all parts of the system significantly increases observability so that when things inadvertently go wrong, debugging can be made efficient.
Feature Table
Development Experience and Interface Design
Bubble and Momen have taken distinctive approaches to their visual editor interfaces. They all roughly divide their editor into sections handling data, logic, and user interface. They differ in their terminology and user experience philosophy. Bubble has developed its own unique nomenclature, for example referring to database rows as "things", while Momen adheres more closely to industry-standard terminology.
In terms of frontend development, Bubble currently holds a significant advantage, especially in terms of reusability. Developers can create reusable styles, components, and workflows, making it easier to maintain consistency across larger applications. Momen currently lacks frontend reusability features, though this functionality is actively under development and scheduled for release by the end of 2024. However, Momen does offer real-time frontend preview capabilities, allowing developers to see changes instantly without refreshing – a feature not available in Bubble.
When it comes to version control and collaboration, Bubble provides a more mature offering with support for branching and merging, which Momen currently lacks. Both platforms support collaborative editing, but Bubble's branching and versioning capabilities give it an edge for team development. Bubble offers a frontend debugger, which Momen also lacks. Both platforms provide a logging system, with Momen offering more flexible log filtering including range queries.
Technical Capabilities
Frontend Development
Both platforms provide standard HTML components for frontend development, though Bubble offers a more extensive component library including shapes, icons, and maps. For responsive design, both platforms leverage modern layout techniques, with Momen exclusively using flexbox while Bubble supports both block and flexbox layouts. Custom code integration differs between the platforms: Bubble uses a plugin system based on HTML and plain JavaScript, while Momen supports React components through its code component feature. Both platforms offer comprehensive SEO features out of the box.
At runtime, Bubble is exclusively server-rendered. So each page visit is a roundtrip to Bubble's server. Momen is by default client-rendered, but it can be server-rendered or statically server-generated. This also means websites built in Momen are naturally single-page application(SPA)s, something Bubble cannot handle, only mimic, via conditional views.
Backend Architecture
The platforms are built on PostgreSQL, but their approaches to database management differ significantly. Bubble appears to abstract away from traditional database structures, likely using JSONB storage, which eliminates the need for migrations but comes with limitations. It lacks true 1:N relations, ACID guarantees in backend workflows, and support for atomic operations like increment/decrement. It also significantly hinders PostgreSQL's optimizer proper operation as JSONB does not have built-in statistics support, making queries and updates slower. Momen takes a different approach, providing a thin wrapper around PostgreSQL that exposes most of its native functionality.
Neither platform currently supports direct looping in their workflow engines. Both handle complex permissions well for database operations. Momen extends its attribute-based-access-control (ABAC) permission system to cover third-party APIs, backend workflows (Actionflows), and AI interactions. API creation also differs significantly: Bubble's default APIs are not human-readable, one has to specifically enable each table to be exposed in a human-readable fashion, while Momen generates GraphQL APIs that are more developer-friendly. In addition, if not more importantly, Momen's GraphQL API allows fetching only required data and also related data in one round-trip. For example, a list of posts (only the title and creation time, ignoring update time) with its last 5 viewers (username and avatar only), its author (username, avatar and creation time) and its comment count, can be fetched in a single round trip. This significantly cuts down latency, resulting in faster loading pages. At the same time, it reduces load on the backend, as unnecessary fields are not even fetched from the database.
Performance and Scalability
Performance characteristics vary significantly between the platforms. Bubble's backend workflows typically process around 100 rows per second, while Momen's approach of pushing as work as possible directly to the database achieves up to 5,000 rows per second. This is especially significant for importing large amounts of data. Neither platform currently offers built-in backend caching controls.
For infrastructure, Bubble offers dedicated instances under their control, while Momen provides both single-tenant servers (Momen-controlled) and bring-your-own-cloud deployment (customer controlled) options. Bubble's dedicated instances start at around $3,500 per month. Financially, this represents a clear incentive to upgrade when applications exceed 22 million WU (Workflow Units) per month, equivalent to 44 million database inserts or updates. Momen's scaling model is based on requests per second (RPS), with single-tenant instances providing additional 100-200 RPS each, up to a self-service maximum of 32 instances (3,200-6,400 RPS).
Platform Support and Future Development
As of this writing, both platforms support web development, with Bubble offering beta versions of iOS and Android apps. Momen plans to begin mobile platform development in 2025. Bubble has announced plans for offline data support and notifications for their native apps, though the full feature set is still being determined.
Cost Analysis
The pricing models of both platforms reflect their different approaches to scalability. Bubble uses a Workflow Unit (WU) based pricing model, with costs calculated based on various operations such as database queries, API calls, and plugin usage. Their pricing ranges from free tier to enterprise-level dedicated instances at $3,500 monthly. Momen's pricing is structured around RPS and resource usage, with options for both shared and single-tenant infrastructure. Their single-tenant solutions start at $120 per month per instance, with additional costs based on storage and outflow requirements. For more detailed analysis of hypothetical scenarios, please checkout the calculator spreadsheets:
Momen: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1QQ-zkiUGGDOmJaYADjP0zH9WoyOurAQ5Zaxjv2AJ-Cg/edit?gid=0#gid=0
Bubble: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1H0wbV_W2PI3GI6BtxkvRgGQkHjQ0FtGpReuN9-ZGzII/edit?gid=0#gid=0
Data Portability
Both platforms support full database exports, though neither currently offers tools for exporting application logic or workflows. This creates some level of vendor lock-in, as migrating complex applications out of the platforms would require significant redevelopment effort. The availability of migration tools remains unclear for both platforms.
Looking Ahead
Both platforms have clear development roadmaps addressing their current limitations. Momen is actively developing frontend reusability features expected by end of 2024 and plans to begin mobile development in 2025. Bubble continues to mature its mobile offerings and is working on editor modernization.
My own biased 2c
I think more than likely Momen is going to the better platform in the future not just because I own it, but because its cleaner architecture, its openness to standards and its openness to code. The latter two means it will be better at leveraging existing assets, and code assets are going to be more plentiful than no-code ones in the foreseeable future. Cleaner and more advanced architecture should also enable Momen to move forward at a faster pace.
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