Over the last two weeks, I've been evaluating and trying out different headless CMSes, databases, and libraries like Refine to power my simple personal site.

I spent the most time with Refine and Supabase, and up until a few days ago, it seemed like Refine would be what I stayed with. I think what Refine offers out of the box is excellent. The ability to stand up a custom CRUD interface with low effort is really useful. I do appreciate what the Refine team is building.

However, when it came time to add customization or additional features, I spent more time stumbling through the docs than building what I wanted/needed.

A few days ago, I ripped refine out of my project for a custom-built interface using a component library called Mantine. Maybe it's because I've been building stuff like this for a long time, but I built exactly what I needed without Refine in less time than it took to get to the same spot with Refine.

The new swizzle command could have solved some of my issues, but I'm too far gone to go back.