Hey! I'm the creator (fork-er?) of Plain. I have mixed feelings too — if all this does is help spur some new activity around Django, that would be a good outcome!
Yeah I'm not 100% sure yet what level of Django experience is required to use (or at least appreciate) Forge? Should you have used Django at least once before on a project? Gone through the official Django tutorial maybe (https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/4.0/intro/tutorial01/)? At the moment, if you have not actually used Django before then I probably would recommend you go through their tutorial and THEN try Forge (or watch the video / read https://www.djangoforge.dev/docs/start/).
Some differences will immediately jump out — they'll tell you very (very) little about how to manage your dependencies, local environment, hosting/deploying, configuring settings with "secrets" for local vs production, the fact you'll probably want a custom AUTH_USER model later and it will be super hard to change, etc. But yeah, to sell those as differences, you do need to have a baseline familiarity or else I need to do a really thorough job of explaining and pointing them out ahead of time.
I think the gist, if you compared vanilla Django to Forge, would be that vanilla Django is almost completely open-ended. There are a lot of decisions you're going to have to make, and research you're probably going to have to do. Forge removes a lot of those decisions and makes them for you. Some are easy to spot up front, but others not until you're further down the road or have more experience...
> Can you make a video, where you show how to make a full fledged SaaS with django-forge and deploy it? How long would that video be?
Videos are absolutely the way to go. I'll try to do more and run through more of the parts and maybe a complete process. That first video I made stops short of deploying to Heroku, but it's maybe 5 minutes away from being deployed. Beyond that, basically every "topic" in the sidebar could use at least one video.
Lol, that's why I added the "or watch the video / read the Forge start page". 50% off right now though! Still thinking through some of these things. Not sure how to let people "try" it without basically giving away all of the value (code, which you can't take back).
I watched (partially) the video. Do you think it shows what you can do with django-forge? Does anybody here think so? In this case I will watch it again in 3 month.
I haven't actually tried Pegasus, so I can't say exactly. In a lot of ways I'm sure they're similar. Some differences with Forge might be the removal of options:
- Pegasus looks like it supports multiple CSS frameworks, Forge only comes with Tailwind
- Pegasus talks about multiple deployment options, Forge focuses completely on Heroku
- Pegasus talks about creating venvs or using virtualenvwrapper (+ pip-compile?), Forge uses Poetry
From what I understand, the update process for Pegasus is also a little bit more manual? Forge is intentionally set up to be a git remote, with directories and stuff named so that an update is essentially `git merge django-forge/main`.
Probably lots of little differences when you get into it — just different decisions from different people. Hoping to document more of Forge soon!
Yeah I could see that argument too. Lots of hard decisions and interesting questions in terms of how to navigate what people want/need. Honestly I don't envy their situation. It has even made me think crazy things like what a Django fork would look like... the thing has some bloat that could stand to be removed too. And some legacy decisions that are super hard to change, but also need to be changed.
Kudos to czue and Pegasus! I haven't used it before, but if that's a better fit for what you want, go buy it!
Honestly I feel a little weird "competing" directly with something like this, but such is life. Thanks to everyone who has made something similar (in any ecosystem), which is part of what got me over the hump of thinking it was even possible. I'm glad Django is getting some options and new ideas!
Hey, competition is what it is. If there was no competition you'd be in a bad market!
In this case there's probably room for a handful of small players at least, and certainly many people will have different opinions about what the "right" way to build a Django SaaS should be, so it makes sense there would be multiple products in the space.
At first glance Forge looks like it's trying to be more upmarket and more opinionated than Pegasus, while Pegasus is more price-accessible and flexible. Certainly there are pros and cons to both positions.
Good luck! I'm sure we'll see each other on the battlefield. :)
All good ideas — thanks for taking the time. I've been thinking about some of these but not all.
On the 1 customer vs 100, I totally lean towards the 100. I have a blend of these with https://www.pullapprove.com/ and the higher the price, the more it feels like you just work for them. Pros and cons, but personally I don't want something that looks like freelance/consulting/employment.
