The Best Forest Admin Alternative
Here’s a Forest Admin Alternative to Rapidly Build and Launch Custom Admin Panels
Are you a developer, tasked (yet again) with building an internal admin panel? If so, you’ve probably come across Forest Admin. This popular admin panel builder provides a streamlined way to create powerful and customizable interfaces, offering features like data management, user roles, and integrations that are essential for managing internal tools. Forest Admin aims to be “the admin panel of choice for any online business.”
However, while Forest Admin is a strong contender, it’s not the only option. Whether you need more flexibility, better pricing, or a tool that aligns more closely with your tech stack, there are a variety of Forest Admin alternatives that can make building and deploying admin panels even easier.
In this article, we will explore the best Forest Admin alternative, so the next time you’re asked to develop an admin panel, you’ll have the right tool at your fingertips.
Who This Article Is For
This article is for all developers whose next web application is supposed to look something like the wireframe below and who would like to develop an admin panel quickly.
What is Forest Admin?
Forest Admin is a turnkey solution for building admin panels. It is designed to help developers create powerful, customizable back-office tools without reinventing the wheel. At its core, Forest Admin provides out-of-the-box functionality for many standard features that are commonly required in admin interfaces.
The team at Forest Admin created the solution with the belief that there is no need to always recode the fundamental features of an admin panel. These include native CRUD operations (Create, Read, Update, Delete), sorting, pagination, search & filtering in table views, activity logs to track user actions or a Role-Based Access Control permission system that covers both the frontend and backend API level.
Forest Admin also includes out-of-the-box collaboration features like notes, task assignments, ownership tracking, and approval workflows, which are commonly found in internal tools.
Forest Admin Pricing
Forest Admin’s Pro plan is US$48 per user/month and gives access to all features. A one-month free trial is available.
Five: The Best Forest Admin Alternative
There are even faster ways to build and launch admin panels web apps than Forest Admin.
Five is a cloud-based rapid application development environment designed to speed up the process of building and deploying admin panels on nearly any data source.
For developers, the beauty of Five lies in its ability to drastically reduce development time while offering robust functionality – without compromising on flexibility or control.
What makes Five stand out as a Forest Admin alternative? Let’s break it down:
Auto-Generated Admin Panels:
Five can instantly generate a ready-to-use admin panel that connects to almost any data source, whether it’s a database or an API. You won’t need to manually code from scratch or worry about building complex backend integrations—Five takes care of that.
Database Modeler for MySQL:
With Five’s intuitive database modeling tool, you can design and manage your database schema directly in the platform, making it easy to create and modify tables without jumping between different environments.
Connection Wizard:
Need to pull data from an external REST API or connect to a different database? Five’s connection wizard simplifies the process of integrating external data sources, making complex integrations straightforward.
Advanced Querying of Data Sources:
When using Five’s built-in MySQL database, you can query it natively in standard SQL. There is no complicated setup required. Five gives you all the tools to build an entire application from scratch or to connect to an external data source and use it as a front-end builder.
Form, Chart, and Report Wizards:
These tools allow you to quickly build forms for data collection, charts for data visualization, and reports for insight generation—all within a few clicks. Gone are the days when you needed to pull in Charts.JS or jsreport to get this done.
Out-of-the-Box Security:
Five includes built-in authentication and authorization, complete with advanced features like Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) and Single Sign-On (SSO). This takes the headache out of managing user access and security, a common pain point when building an admin panel.
Audit Trail & Logs:
Five’s audit trail and logging features allow you to track every action taken within the admin panel, making it easy to monitor system changes and ensure accountability.
Built-in Debugger & Event-Driven Programming:
Debugging is seamless with Five’s built-in debugger, while its support for event-driven programming gives you control over your application’s behavior at critical moments.
Single-Click Deployment:
Whether you’re testing in development or launching in production, Five offers single-click deployment to pre-configured environments, meaning you can go from build to launch with minimal friction.
Simple Pricing:
Five charges a simple monthly fee per application, starting from US$29.99 per application and month with 10 end-users. This makes it an attractive Forest Admin alternative, as its pricing is predictable. Developers and application owners can easily calculate an application’s total cost of ownership.
The best part? No external tools, libraries, or frameworks are required. Five provides everything you need, from database modeling to deployment, all within a single platform. All development happens right in your browser, allowing for real-time collaboration with your team or solo coding sessions.
Five covers the entire admin panel development lifecycle, letting you focus on delivering a polished, powerful solution without worrying about the usual development overhead.
Admin Panel Tutorial: Build and Deploy an Admin Panel in Minutes
In this admin panel tutorial, you will learn step-by-step how to create a fully functional admin panel using Five. Whether you are starting from scratch or integrating with an existing project, this hands-on guide will walk you through everything you need to build a powerful admin interface in no time.
Here’s what you’ll achieve by the end of this tutorial:
Database Creation:
We’ll start by creating a database from scratch using Five’s built-in MySQL modeler, so you can manage and structure your data with ease.
Auto-Generated Admin Panel:
With your database ready, you’ll instantly generate an admin panel that includes essential features like forms for data collection, interactive charts for visualization, and a PDF report generator.
User Management & Authentication:
Learn how to add user management and authentication features to control who accesses your admin panel.
Third-Party Integration:
Finally, you will integrate your admin panel with external services like Slack, giving your application the ability to send real-time notifications and alerts.
What Developers Say About Five
Here is what users say about Five:
“Five is a great product for building admin panels or CRUD applications. It is easy to use, scalable and has great customer support. I highly recommend Five to anyone who needs to build a web application without much effort.” – Shweta Kale, Software Developer
“Five is an excellent approach to that disconnect between relational database development and the web.” – Crag Jones
“Five took away a lot of headaches of frontend development by providing a highly customizable UI and navbar alongside a MySQL database.” – Nebiyu Elias, Software Engineer
“With Five, we were able to very quickly develop a prototype of the solution we had in mind. We liked the fact that inside Five, we can work in no code, low code, or even full code, which gives us full flexibility to design software applications.” – Kurt Bornhutter, Group Manager, Revenue & Optimisation, Canstar
“Five is a rapid, robust way to take spreadsheet-based business processes, and replace them with better validated forms for data collection, and approval workflows. Five makes it easy to write custom functions, and perform traditional integrations, using JavaScript.” – Philip Antrobus, Data & AI Capability Lead, NCS Australia
Other Forest Admin Alternatives
In addition to the solution we’ve highlighted, several other popular alternatives to Forest Admin might suit your needs:
Retool: Retool is a powerful platform for building custom internal tools with a drag-and-drop interface. It allows you to integrate with various databases and APIs, giving you flexibility in managing data and creating dynamic, interactive admin panels without having to write all the code from scratch. Retool is a great choice if you’re looking for a balance between customizability and ease of use.
Budibase: Budibase is an open-source platform that enables you to build internal tools and admin panels quickly. It comes with a wide range of pre-built components, supports different data sources, and is highly customizable. Budibase is ideal for teams that prefer open-source flexibility and want more control over their deployment options.
UI Bakery: UI Bakery offers a low-code environment that allows you to build internal tools with a visually intuitive interface. It supports custom REST API integrations and offers a robust design system for creating polished user interfaces. UI Bakery is a good fit for developers looking for a design-focused tool that can connect to various data sources.
Each of these tools has its strengths and can be a great alternative to Forest Admin, depending on your specific requirements and the complexity of the internal tools you need to build.
By evaluating these options alongside your project needs, you can find the solution that best fits your workflow and business objectives.
Continue developing your admin panel by following our comprehensive code-along articles here.
