Not an active contributor either as a dev or as an implementer, but I believe the second option of building one from scratch would be the better route even though it would be more time and resource consuming. I deployed Fineract in 2020 for my employer (at the time). And until this day, they refer to it as "Mifos".
The second option provides an opportunity to have a clean slate for creating a UI from the ground up. Unfortunately I'm more into VoIP/telephony these days than Fineract so I might not be able to contribute a lot. But I still keep an eye on Fineract because I really liked it (and may come back to it in future as I'm looking at tying remittances into my telephony offering in the future) Sent from my iPhone > On 18 Jun 2025, at 01:33, James Dailey <jdai...@apache.org> wrote: > > Hello Fineract Community, > > In several quarterly updates to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) > Board [1], a recurring concern has been noted—both by us and by the > Board: the Fineract project remains closely tied to and dependent upon > the Mifos project. This is an issue we need to actively address. > > This is not a new observation. Many contributors, myself included, > come from the Mifos community—after all, I founded the Mifos project > in 2001. It’s deeply embedded in our collective history. However, from > the perspective of ASF governance, this level of dependency poses a > problem. > > For example, Apache Fineract® currently relies on the Mifos Admin UI > (https://github.com/openMF/web-app) for visibility into its > functionality. This is partly by design - we envisioned Fineract as > a headless backend system and expected a plethora of vendors creating > their own UIs on top of it. But what we missed is that the current > web-app AdminUI is really a terrific expression of the surface area of > the application; while theoretically there could be APIs that are part > of fineract that are not in the Web-App, in reality none of those have > been maintained. > > At one point, we even bundled the Mifos WebApp with the Fineract > Docker image. However, this UI is not part of the Fineract project and > cannot be released under its name. Per ASF policy, Mifos is considered > a vendor, and all ASF projects must adhere to strict vendor > neutrality. > > This means that Fineract needs its own complete, standalone solution—a > user interface that allows the core platform functionality to be > demonstrated and accessed independently. We need an AdminUI. > > To that end, I have two questions for the community: > > Does anyone have an alternative UI solution—fully independent and > ready for contribution—that we can consider adopting under the > Fineract project? > > If not, we’ll need to begin the process of defining requirements and > planning a new UI component. I intend to make this process as open and > transparent as possible, though we should expect it to take some time. > > I also believe that the new concept should allow for a more pluggable > approach - to enable vendors to say "we base our solution on Fineract > and we have the following add-ons", without having to make those > components UIs separate from the base AdminUI. > > Let’s begin the discussion. If there are alternatives to this > approach, I'm interested. > > Thanks, > - James > > [1] > https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/FINERACT/2025-04+%28April%29+Report+to+ASF+Board
