I'm one of the founders of VoltAgent. Over the past months, we've been building it with a simple focus: AI development lacks real-time observability.
When you work with agents, it's often a black box. You write some code, run it, and just hope it behaves. If something goes wrong, debugging feels painful. Tools like n8n showed us how powerful it is to see a workflow step-by-step, but as soon as we needed customization and deeper control, we hit the limits of no-code tools.
VoltAgent is our attempt to bring that visibility to a real framework. It's an open-source, TypeScript framework for building and orchestrating AI agents with observability built in from the start.
What VoltAgent offers
- TypeScript-native building blocks -> tools, memory, multi-agent orchestration, and seamless ai-sdk integration.
- Real-time observability -> OpenTelemetry-based tracing and a visual console to inspect how agents think step by step.
Wow, thank you for this thoughtful message. You really got what we’re trying to build. We’re pushing hard to bring shadcn-level simplicity to agents. Your feedback means a lot!
The dilemma of choosing the right tool for a long-term project is understandable. We are running an open source React framework called refine for building Enterprise B2B apps like admin panels, internal tools and dashboard.
It's designed to be ensuring that projects remain maintainable even as time goes by. With its headless architecture, it can be used with custom styles or any UI library and data services. Maybe it helps you somehow
Just for clarity: the author of this comment is not from our team. But if you ask for my opinion, I enjoyed reading the article. We always pursue ideas that will take 'refine' to the next level, and this piece was helpful to us.
If I understand correctly, using 'swizzle' to customize the data provider is not a hack for refine, but an expected behavior. But I'm curious about the conversation; could you possibly share the link?
The deceptive part of these types of frameworks is this: on the first day, you think it will solve all your problems. On the second day, you're happy, thinking about how much you've sped up because you chose this framework for your project. On the third day, you have a custom need, and you research how to do it within that framework. On the fourth day, you hack the framework to make it flexible. On the fifth day, you say, 'Why didn't I start from scratch myself?'
Our goal and motivation in developing refine is to ensure that the developer continues to feel the way they felt on the first day, even on the day they finish the project and begin to maintain it.
Here's what sets Refine apart: we're all about getting hands-on with the code, rather than relying solely on drag-and-drop like some other tools do, such as Retool, Appsmith, Tooljet, Budibase, and others. Instead of just giving you a set of pre-made building blocks, Refine goes the extra mile and creates a complete React project for you. This project comes packed with useful hooks and providers that make your work smoother.
We also have this 'headless' feature that lets developers seamlessly blend in their favorite UI framework or their own custom designs without any hassle. This flexibility is particularly great for things like complex admin panels, SAAS interfaces, and B2B portals. On the other hand, if you're working on simpler tools for internal use – you know, the ones that don't need a lot of tweaking – Refine might offer more complexity than necessary.
Oops, you're absolutely right. The frontend ecosystem is quite complex, and the entry barrier for engineers working in other roles is getting a little higher every day. Perhaps by default, Vite should be used, and Remix or Next.js alternatives should be shown for advanced frontend developers. Thank you so much; we will definitely improve this area.
refine's headless architecture offers developers the flexibility to implement their design using any UI framework to their apps. It also comes with built-in UI integrations for popular libraries like Material UI, Ant Design, Chakra UI, and Mantine.
With react-admin, you have no choice other than using Material UI for your app.
refine's provides nearly all the features of react-admin enterprise provides as open-source.
Since refine's architecture is headless, router logic is completely detached from the business logic and UI layer. So you can use refine with React Router, NextJS, Remix, or any other framework may pop-up as long as it's React based.
With react-admin, you can only use react-router and it doesn't have a real SSR support, while with refine, you can use SSR frameworks like NextJS and Remix without being limited.
Thank you so much for your comment. We believe that the most valuable aspect is allowing developers to work in their own environment with the tools and integrations they prefer. We're very happy that we've been able to reflect this.
Hey, with our open-core, you can connect to any data source as long as it provides a Public API.
In our Enterprise edition, however, we support Direct Database connections (PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, Oracle DB) and other integrations that cannot be used client-side (such as Salesforce, Slack, Stripe, etc.)
Thank you for your kind message and for sharing your positive experience with Refine. We appreciate your feedback about our documentation and developer experience, and we'll continue to work hard to improve them further. We're glad that our support team has been responsive to your requests in Discord, and we'll do our best to maintain this level of service.
Thank you for your support, and we look forward to serving you even better in the future. Please don't hesitate to reach out if you have any more questions or feedback.
Hey Community, Omer here, CTO at refine. After six months of hard work, we’re excited to share our first cloud product: https://refine.new
refine.new is a powerful tool that lets you create React-based, headless UI enterprise applications right in your browser. You have the ability to preview, modify, and download your project immediately, thereby streamlining the development process.
By visually combining options for your preferred React platform(CRA, Next.js and Remix), UI framework, backend connector, and authentication provider; you can create tailor-made architectures for your project in seconds.
It feels like having access to thousands of project templates, allowing you to choose the one that best suits your needs.
Once you’ve made your selections, you’ll have access to a live preview that you can customize further with themes and logos.
If you haven’t heard abou refine, it’s an open-source, headless React framework for quickly building enterprise web apps. It streamlines tasks like CRUD operations, state management, routing, authentication, access control and i18n.
refine’s “Headless UI” approach makes it compatible with any custom design, and it integrates with popular UI frameworks like Ant Design, Material UI, Chakra UI, and Mantine. It’s backend-agnostic and can connect to 15+ backend services out-of-the-box, including custom REST & GraphQL APIs.
Developers maintain complete control over their projects with refine, building, styling, and deploying as they see fit.
To learn more, GitHub repo, or dive into our comprehensive documentation filled with real-life examples and tutorials.