Bubble
p/bubble
Build web apps without code, entirely visually
Ben Tossell
Bubble — Build a fully functional web app without any code
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Bubble is web development framework and a visual programming tool. It enables non-technical people to build production-ready web and mobile apps without code.

Replies
Luis Solano
This is how the web was supposed to be – will recommend. Congrats!
Colin Vincent
Emmanuel, so great to interview you about the successful launch here on Product Hunt - here is the interview link https://soundcloud.com/equitydir...
Tara Reed
I'm a non-technical founder & I have been using Bubble for a while now. Built our MVP with it, started bringing in revenue, got into 500 Startups accelerator, & continue to build with Bubble! I've been documenting my experience building without code here --> http://bit.ly/1WISExa As a non-technical founder without a ton of money to spend, Bubble was the best option for me. Yes, I could hire developers, but when I started, I didn't have money to hire top talent. And as a non-technical person, there's nothing more difficult than managing so-so developers b/c you have no idea whether they're doing a good job or not! Hands down, Bubble was & continues to be the best option for us! Amazing work guys. Congrats on the success.
Emmanuel Straschnov
@tarareed_ Thanks Tara :)
Nick Davis
This looks really interesting, thank you for sharing (and making it!)
Joshua Berk
Works perfectly with https://localizejs.com/ for internationalisation -- which means you can scale it beyond an MVP too! :)
Alex Nguyen
Looks awesome but i'm having trouble displaying dynamic content based on the unique ID :S
Emmanuel Straschnov
@aelxnguyen For things like that can you use the forum? http://forum.bubble.is Also, did you do the "send data to pages" lesson? that's the lesson that explains how this works.
Emmanuel Straschnov
Hi everyone, I'm Emmanuel, cofounder of Bubble with @jphaas1. We're excited to have it here! We started Bubble because we think that more people should be able to build things online, and the main bottleneck so far is learning how to code. So instead of teaching everyone how to code (which is great for educational purposes), we think we should rethink how people create software. So we came up with Bubble, a visual programming language that enables you to build apps (web apps for now, iOS is in beta) visually. The things you can build can be quite complex. A user did clone 90% of Twitter on Bubble. Marketplaces are very much what you can build on us. It does take time (we don't offer templates to keep flexibility); cloning Twitter took about 4 days, but it's still much faster to use than code. The learning curve is about 3 hours. And after this, we handle infrastructure, servers, etc! The vision is that you should only have to focus on your app's design and functionality, and we handle the lower level stuff. We'd love to hear your thoughts, and will be here to answer questions! Thanks for your support!!!
Romain Lacombe
@estraschnov congratulations on the launch! I have to say I admire the bold vision behind Bubble – I'm not sure we'll ever see a world where developing software happens without any code, but your product is making building products much more widely accessible. Congrats! One question: how do you see the impact of Bubble in the education sector?
Emmanuel Straschnov
@rlacombe @estraschnov Well we're not saying we're going to replace all of software engineering and make it without code, but we're hoping to make that 80% of the tasks/apps that require code today won't in the future, so that engineers (the ones that code) can work on more fundamental stuff. To you question: it's something we haven't explored yet too much (mostly because of resources), but I see Bubble as an intermediate between Scratch and code, and so that could be a great tool to teach kids how to think in a programmatic way, thinking about flows, data structure, conditions, etc, while not having to worry too much for the syntax, with I think is 1) tedious 2) not for everyone
Shlok Vaidya
@estraschnov Big fan of this approach. Abstracting out first generation 'development' interfaces is a huge problem that gets in the way of adopting new tech - I've argued this about CAD and 3D Printing, but definitely code as well. Even if you can get, as you say, 80% of the way, there, that's that many more people building their own stuff, which is great for the ecosystem. One thing I'm looking for as this builds out, is integration into existing workflows - basically, how can someone, as a non-coder, 'apply code' into what I'm already doing (say, building out collateral in Photoshop), without having to think about if that functionality is code or not. Something along those lines - huge opportunity to you guys, but code becomes, for more and more people, just plumbing and not a functional skillset. I dunno, zooming out, what genuinely excites me about this approach is that it opens up - not in its current iteration, but someday - the opportunity for a kid in a slum to program something that solves a problem for him and his without having to know how to read, do math, code, or have anything more in his hand than an old Nokia brick.
Emmanuel Straschnov
@shloky @estraschnov Yeah, that's exactly what we find exciting as well :) The way we want to do it is to enable coders to add elements, events, actions and data sources in Bubble, that would then have a visual interface that non coders can use (the Bubble editor). In fact, that's what we do internally, we build these bricks, but we'll open that to people at some point (as early as possible).
Marcell Almeida
@rlacombe @estraschnov I strong believe that this is the future of programming. Not sure how long it will take. But as something similar, but focused on games, you can see Construct 2 https://www.scirra.com/construct2
Darren J Smith
As a Product/UX guy who is familiar with coding (but a terrible programmer), this has just opened up a wealth of possibilities. I have a dozen mini products I'd like to build and this sounds like the perfect platform!
Dan Seider
This sounds amazing! Will be recommending and maybe even trying out myself! Thanks for creating this.
Amit Sonawane
@estraschnov how timely! How powerful is this platform? Say... could it be used to build a MVP for a CRM or Marketing Automation product?
Emmanuel Straschnov
@amitsonawane The best way is to try it (and it's free) :), but it's quite powerful. And CRM is very much database management, which is what Bubble is built for. A user cloned most of Twitter, one our bigger clients sells loans for solar panel, and the whole process for people to get approved, get their money, for installers to see the different projects, etc. is done through a web app built on Bubble (they don't have engineers). There might some APIs or some other things that we need to add at some point, but 1) there are very often some workarounds 2) we do add features on requests. In fact, probably 30% of the features we have now have been added after explicit requests (sometimes sponsored).
Paul Katsen
This video blew me away when I first saw it:
. Congrats @estraschnov on launch!
Marshall
I saw this a while ago and wondered why the heck it's not on Product Hunt! Congrats guys. Very interested to see how this effects my own workflow, and the industry at large.
Emmanuel Straschnov
@meiiowmarsh Thanks!! Well we wanted to be ready:)
Veasna Onn
Finding out about Bubble is probably one of the most exciting thing to happen to me recently. Thank you @estraschnov
David Iwanow
Just starting playing around with this, I love the tutorials!
Manish Sahajwani
This looks amazing. Can you throw some light on your technology stack?
Emmanuel Straschnov
@msahajwani Of course. We use a bunch of stuff, but in general, we're on node.js, use elasticsearch of applications' data, firebase for applications (the actual app you build in the editor) and use intensively coffeescript/jquery. Applications are rendered client side.
Mariana Salcido
@msahajwani I know it was long time ago but... Can I embed then on my website?
Emmanuel Straschnov
@mariana_salcido @msahajwani Sorry just saw this. Well it's a question for your website, but with an iframe i don't wee why not.
Guillaume Hourmant
Bubble is great for non-tech founders who want to launch a projet. It's also great if you have a tech team that need to create new products and do it fast! Congrats for this amazing platform.
alan leong
@tarareed_ very good inspiration
Tara Reed
@hello_alanleong wow! thanks :)
alan leong
@estraschnov Bubbling now... think it will be a useful tools for creative like me :)
Emmanuel Straschnov
@hello_alanleong bubbling... I love it :)
Fred Rivett
Well done on the great launch guys, this definitely looks like a great tool for non-technical founders looking to prototype & MVP. For me though, as a front end developer, I immediately thought how will this work on mobile and responsively in general? Intrigued to hear how dragging an input here and another element there will translate when the screen real estate is smaller. As a result of challenges like this, I personally can't see something like this replacing hand-coded web apps from technical founders, as with front end frameworks like Foundation & Bootstrap & back end frameworks like Laravel Spark & Ruby on Rails the learning curve & time required is minimal and provides a better experience all round (or so I would imagine!). Possibly for first level MVP's but beyond that, I'd be surprised.
Kostas Xiradakis
@fredrivett nice question. Maybe they could offer different @media screen sizes to play with the UI a bit and fit things around. nice catch!
Andu Potorac
@fredrivett They released an update that addresses responsiveness. It's beautiful and you can preview it here:
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Fred Rivett
@andupotorac Nice, just had a quick flick through. Looks like a good start on a responsive website builder :)
Andu Potorac
@fredrivett I wouldn't call it a good start, but one of the best approaches. Why? Because right now there's only two approaches to responsiveness when it comes to site builders: complete freedom (readymag, wix), or restricted movement (weebly, yola, jimdo, most..). I exclude those where you can write your own code specifically to make this work (webydo, webflow). So they are a mix between the two: freedom (move it where you want) and they still create a responsive layout by the approach they have taken. It's genius and hasn't been done before. :)
Fred Rivett
@andupotorac Sure. I skipped through the video (its 30mins long) so I can't comment too much here. Looked like they're on the right tracks with it.
Matt G.
This looks really neat, great work on this! Couple of questions if you don't mind: 1. who owns the application data? 2. can it be exported?
Emmanuel Straschnov
@iwaffles Thanks!! So to your questions: 1) You own your app and it's data. You own the design, the workflows that defines your app in our system. You also own all your application's data, in other words the data uploaded by your users (or differently based on your own privacy policy). You can see our FAQ for more details but that's pretty much it bubble.is/faq 2) We have an enterprise version of our code that people can run on their own infrastructure. That's for users that have larger traffic and that want to keep control on their servers, but it's definitely possible.
Matt G.
@estraschnov @iwaffles Awesome, thanks so much for the reply! Excited to give this a shot over the next few weeks!