Base44 alternatives
Base44 bet early on "the backend comes with it" and was acquired by Wix. The bet was right, and precisely because it was right it stopped being a differentiator: a database, authentication and integrations included are now what the whole category ships.
So the question that brings somebody to this page is rarely "is there something better". It is one of four, and each has a different answer.
Before switching: when to stay
If your app is an internal tool. A company dashboard, a team tracker, a system ten people use to work: that is where Base44 is strong, and where no alternative on this list hands you an advantage worth starting over for.
If you value a large company behind it. Distribution, permanence and the comfort of buying from somebody who will not disappear are real, and for plenty of buyers they decide the purchase. After Wix, that is an argument for Base44, not against it.
The four reasons, and what to do about each
1. The acquisition made you uncomfortable
That is a legitimate worry and a poor fit for analysis: nobody outside knows what a company will do with a product it bought. What you can do is lower the cost of an eventual exit, and that does not require switching now.
Ask two questions, of your current tool and of any candidate:
Can you export the code? And from which plan. Export is what turns a platform into a tool rather than a rental.
Does the published app need a proprietary runtime to keep standing? That is the question almost nobody asks, and it decides whether "export" means anything.
If both answers are good where you are, the anxiety does not justify migrating. If they are bad, it does, and then those two answers are your selection criteria.
2. You need the app in the stores
Base44's focus is web, like almost the whole category. A web app does not appear in App Store search, does not get native push on iPhone unless the person adds it to their home screen, and cannot sell a subscription through the store's system.
Two ways out: FlutterFlow, which ships native Flutter with a mature visual editor and charges in screen-by-screen assembly time; and Fabapp (us), where the published app is packaged and submitted to the stores under your own developer account, with native push and in-app purchase, keeping the conversational format.
3. Fine visual refinement is hard
This is the most common complaint from people using Base44 seriously: when you want a screen to look exactly a certain way, the conversation starts going in circles.
Two opposite directions fix it, and choosing between them says more about you than about the tools:
More manual control. A real visual editor (FlutterFlow) or an environment with the code at hand (Replit) trade conversation for direct manipulation. You gain precision and lose speed.
A better origin. If every screen comes out of the same component library, visual drift never starts and there is less left to refine. On Fabapp that is 57 ready-made components on the same theme tokens, with a static check that rejects a component that does not exist and an invented property before the app compiles.
4. Credits run out before the month does
Base44 counts message credits and integration credits separately, and in an app that talks to external services the second is usually what runs out first. If you compared plans by the first number, you compared the half that matters least to your case.
Before switching over that, read the next section: the problem may not be the plan.
The cost no pricing page shows
Every tool in the category charges in different units: a credit that varies with the task, a message, a seat, a token. Two platforms at the same monthly price can differ tenfold in what you actually get done.
And all of them carry an invisible cost: the retry loop. When the output comes back wrong and you ask again, somebody pays for that second round. In some tools it is you, and that is how the month ends on the twentieth.
That is why this guide does not print other people's prices: plans change month to month and the units do not compare. The official pages are in the sources. The only numbers here are ours: Free at US$ 0, Starter at US$ 19, Builder at US$ 49, Business at US$ 99 and Enterprise at US$ 199 per month. The table is on plans and pricing.
On Fabapp, when verification fails and the system repairs its own output, that round is not billed to you. The platform correcting itself is not a service rendered.
What travels, and what you redo
Data comes out through an export on most platforms. The schema, the access rules and the automations rarely do, and those are what take work to recreate, not the rows in the table.
The code travels where export and GitHub sync exist. It is a starting point, not a transplant: each platform has its own data and authentication layer.
The decisions stay behind. The rules you explained across weeks of conversation do not come with you. Reread your history and write down the product's rules before you leave, on any migration.
How to choose
If the reason is the acquisition, start by asking about export rather than switching. If it is the stores, there are two options and they are very different. If it is visual refinement, decide first whether you want manual control or a single origin, because they pull in opposite directions. If it is credits running out, look first at how much of your consumption is rework.
And test with the app you actually want, not the tutorial's example.
On Fabapp the Free plan does not ask for a card, so you can run the same request here and in what you already use before deciding. Everything the platform does is on features.