A Bubble alternative — for native mobile, not for web

Bubble does build mobile apps, and anyone telling you otherwise is out of date. The question is what kind, and Bubble documents the answer clearly.

It is React Native. Their publishing documentation refers to "Our current version of React Native" and the OS versions it supports — iOS 15.1 and above, Android 12 and above. So the output is a React Native application, not Swift or Kotlin. That is a real, legitimate way to build a mobile app; it is how a large share of the App Store is built. It is simply a different thing from a native app, and the difference matters for some products and not others.

It is in public beta. Bubble's own documentation places the native mobile feature in its beta-features section and describes it as public beta. That is not a criticism — shipping a mobile runtime is hard and doing it in the open is the right way. It is a fact you should weigh before committing a product to it, in the same way you would weigh any dependency's maturity.

Publishing is your job, and it costs what it costs. Bubble's docs set out the same gate every mobile developer meets: Apple charges "an annual fee of $99 and identity verification" and Google "a one-time registration fee of $25." Neither Bubble nor Modaal removes that. Anyone implying otherwise is selling you something.

Two limitations worth reading twice. Bubble notes that "Devices running unsupported OS versions are not guaranteed to work as expected", and that over-the-air updates apply only to the latest built version — users on older builds need a full app update to reach them. Both are ordinary constraints of this architecture, honestly documented.

What we are deliberately not telling you is whether the beta is good enough for your app. We have not shipped a production app on it, so we do not know, and the confident verdicts you will find elsewhere are mostly assembled from forum threads. Build a small thing on it and find out — that is a weekend, and it beats trusting any comparison page, this one included.

Bubble meters consumption rather than seats. Their documentation defines it plainly: "Workload is a measure of the work that Bubble does in order to power your application" — database operations, API calls, searches, workflows. Every plan includes an allowance and you are alerted at 75% and 100% of it.

Go past the allowance with overages enabled and you pay "$0.30 per 1,000 workload units." That is the number everyone quotes, and on its own it is unremarkable.

The sentence that matters is the other one. If overages are disabled and you hit the limit, Bubble's documentation states that "your app will be taken offline."

Read that again with a product in mind. It is not a warning email and a degraded experience — it is your application not being available until you enable overages, buy capacity, or wait for the next billing period. Bubble is being straight with you by documenting it, and it is the correct behaviour for a platform that would otherwise hand you an unbounded bill. But it means the meter is not only a cost question. On a consumption platform your uptime is coupled to your billing settings, and that is a category of risk that does not exist on a flat seat.

Modaal has no meter. There is nothing to run out of, because there is no runtime you are renting — the app runs on the phone, and Modaal is a tool on your Mac that helped you write it. Whatever else is true about the comparison, your app cannot go offline because of your subscription, since your subscription is not what serves it.

We are not publishing specific Bubble prices on this page. Their own pricing FAQ lists the plan names — Free, Starter, Growth, Team and Agency — without prices, the third-party articles quoting figures contradict each other by more than twofold, and pricing is exactly the thing that changes between someone writing a comparison page and you reading it. Go and look at bubble.io/pricing.

This is the difference that persists after every pricing page has been rewritten, and Bubble states it more directly than most platforms would dare.

From their ownership documentation: "you have ownership over your data, encompassing both your app's design and any data uploaded by your users." And then, in the same document: "Bubble retains ownership of the underlying code that powers your app."

And the operative sentence: "Bubble apps can only be run on the Bubble platform; there's no way of exporting your application as code."

That is not a gotcha and we are not going to present it as one. It is the deal, stated openly, and it is the deal for most visual platforms — it is what lets Bubble maintain a runtime, ship improvements to every app at once, and keep the editor coherent. You get your data out as CSV or through the API. You do not get an application you can host somewhere else.

Bubble even documents an escape hatch that very few platforms offer: in the event they discontinue the product, "Bubble's source code will be made available under an open-source license," so you could self-host. That is a genuinely thoughtful commitment and it deserves mentioning on a page like this, even though — perhaps especially because — it argues against our own position.

Modaal's arrangement is the opposite by construction. There is no export step because there is nothing to export from. Modaal is a macOS app that drives Xcode on your machine; the project is a standard Xcode project in a normal folder on your own disk from the first build. Open it in Xcode with Modaal closed. Point your own CI at it. Hand it to a contractor. Stop paying us and the project keeps building.

Which arrangement is better depends entirely on what you are optimising for. A hosted runtime you cannot leave is a real cost and also a real service. If you never want to think about a build pipeline, Bubble's deal is a good one.