Builder.ai is an AI powered platform that helps users builds software faster and cheaper through no code, with the goal of enabling all businesses to become software powered.
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React
Score 9.3 out of 10
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React is a JavaScript library for building user interfaces. React enables users to create interactive UIs. Design simple views for each state in an application, and React will update and render just the right components when data changes. React is available free and open source under the MIT license.
TLDR: 28 months into a 6 month project. They stopped developing it without a working MVP, fired all the developers, and do not respond to my requests that involve figuring out what’s happening and when I will be getting a refund.First, please feel free to reach out before removing this review. Builder.ai has taken down our bad reviews in the past saying they couldn’t verify them. I’ll be happy to point you in the direction of the people I’ve worked with including Jason.Second, when I say this is a fraud from the top down, I’m not exaggerating. Please take a look at the news articles that have come out within the last two years regarding their CEO, CFO, and official auditor.If you are still reading, that means you’re still considering it, so let me tell you about my experience.I started this process by meeting with the sales team at the Silicon Slopes Conference in late 2022. I told them about what I wanted to build and they said that would be very easy and doable. We spent the rest of 2022 meeting with developers who reconfirmed how simple this would be and that even with a relaxed timeframe, we could expect a product in about six months. January 2, 2023, I signed the contract.We had a number of problems from the very beginning, including them giving me the wrong documents to sign and mixing my product up with another. We kept meeting, moving forward, struggled constantly with getting the money flow correct. Weeks turned into months and eventually all of the deadlines were past due with no communication on when they would get updated. Near the end of 2023, we escalated and very clearly said that if they cannot develop this, it’s OK to just say as much and give us our money back. They repeated that they could, added additional developers to the team, and said they would be pushing forward with an MVP shortly.When they released the MVP, the flow of money still didn’t work. Whenever I would bring that up or that I wanted to do end to end testing, they would say that they will be able to do that when it’s ready for full release. Again, months passed of this and I stayed patient. I have to say my patience has been the biggest mistake of this entire process.In November 2024, 23 months in on a six month project, they marked it complete. It wasn’t. The money was still wrong, features I had previously approved had vanished, and when I asked why features I paid for weren’t on there, they said they had questions but decided not to ask them and just mark it complete instead. I was furious, but once again I was trying to make it work. I worked with my project manager, and we spent December creating an entire list of every acceptance criteria. I required photo or video evidence for each piece that it was complete or I wasn’t going to mark it done. I also told them they had until the end of March.As we moved through January and February 2025, they started slipping in comments about how they didn’t think we would make the deadline. I continued escalating, people tried to work with me on it, and I decided to once again, find my patience. It did me no good.On March 26, my project manager told me that they were no longer working on developing my project. They had fired everyone who would’ve been part of developing it and had no plans on what to do going forward. They were supposed to tell me the week before when it happened and he expected that I should get an email about it that week. When I tried reaching out to the legal team that same week about canceling any sort of ongoing contract and getting my money back, they told me they were going to refer me to another group. It is April 18, 2025 and still I have received no communication. My patience now means that I have signed myself up for a painful legal battle. I’m leaving this review to let others know that if they already have a contract, chances are no development work has happened for the last month and they need to demand answers. This is also here for people considering this company. Do not fall for it.
React is a JavaScript user interface construction library that works well for:
Developing web apps with dynamic and complicated user interfaces.
creating reusable UI elements that may be used in other applications.
creating single-page applications with dynamic content updates that don't require a page reload.
The Virtual DOM's effective updating mechanism allows it to handle large volumes of data updates.
React, on the other hand, might be less suitable for:
Websites that are simple, stagnant, and have no interaction. Other libraries or simple HTML, CSS, and JavaScript may be a better fit in such circumstances.
Web sockets may be a better choice for applications that need real-time updates, such as chat or gaming apps.
When creating mobile apps, React Native is a better option.
Server side rendering only, as React is designed to run on the client side.
Solid backing by large organization (Facebook) thats committed to keeping the development on the project. In my mind, this is the number one priority for any library because without this: time is wasted on getting up-to speed on a library that you will never use, have a codebase with a library thats hard to maintain because few years down the lane, hiring devs to maintain an unsupported library is very difficult.
As with any libraries, open source community's support is critical for success of any framework because this allows for more pre-built components that could be used right out-of-box => makes Development using React a breeze.
React's Stateful and Stateless components make organizing your code a breeze. These components would also allow for writing clean Unit Tests on the logic.
React's component lifecycle. It offers a variety of lifecycle methods, that allows for handling different scenarios of loading and manipulating data in the UI.
I found React's documentation very well maintained with plenty of examples explaining each feature.
Responsiveness is a very important criteria in selecting a UI and React is very responsive. It does some neat optimizations on re-rendering using virtual DOM and would only re-render parts of the DOM that changed. These optimizations makes React Applications feel really fast.
React Native would allow for building applications that span across web and mobile interfaces (iOS and Android). This makes learning React even more enticing, because using a single library, you could build applications that span across Web, iOS and Android.
create-react-app is an effort by Facebook (creators of React) that makes getting started with React really easy. It does all the heavy lifting of configurations for you and allow you to focus on just development.
Small footprint, minified React + React DOM is under 150Kb, that makes loading UI's with react really fast.
React + Enzyme (backed by Airbnb) + Sinon + Mocha + Chai makes unit testing the UI components fun and improves the overall maintainability of the project.
React's state management can get hairy if you have a deeply nested component and need to pass things up or down the tree very far. This is where libraries like Redux come in, however.
The progressive nature of its development and change cycles can leave information outdated online faster than other frameworks. This can make finding help or documentation on 3rd party sites frustrating.
The learning curve on "thinking in React" can be slightly higher than other more familiar patterns of web development.
Building an app in it can be cumbersome to set up with webpack, but things like Create React App can get you going in a jiffy.
There are a few things that may take some getting used to when coming to a modern JS frontend. Tools like Babel and Webpack (or abstractions that hide their details from you) are often a starting point and JSX can be confusing at first. But assuming the developer is already familiar with modern frontend tools, React is a very natural fit and makes creating user interfaces a joy.
Since it's open-source and very popular, the community support for React and related tools and libraries is excellent. There are a lot of people using the same tools, and so issues tend to get fixed quickly and "recipes" are easy to come by. And since it's backed by Facebook, they have a dedicated engineering team working on the progression of React.
There are other options for building SPAs, and the two most common aside from React are Vue and Angular. React has been the leader of the pack for a while and has been an innovator. Angular is good for companies that want an opinionated framework so that it standardizes practices. However, Angular is known to be more difficult to work with and unnecessarily complex. Vue is seen as taking the best from React and Angular, and it is built for incremental upgrades. Vue has a passionate and growing user base, but it hasn't quite caught React in popularity.
Since we're still in the conversion cycle, all the data is not in. But React has had a positive impact on Developer productivity and the ability to produce efficient, highly flexible UX. This in turn, enhances our customer experience, which is generally the most important component of our ROI.
Conversion has been difficult since it requires a change of mindset. Most developers have adapted quite well, but the process has been lengthy, and 2 years in, we are still not fully converted. This essentially is a temporary negative impact on ROI.
