It is headless by default and supports Material UI, AntDesign, Chakra UI, and Mantine.
It also has connectors for 15+ backend services including REST API, GraphQL, NestJs CRUD, Airtable, Strapi, Strapi v4, Strapi GraphQL, Supabase, Hasura, Nhost, Appwrite, Firebase..
Wow! It is great to see another low code, open source platform being launched. I’ve been involved with open source for over 25 years, and I am a big believer in the power of open source to accelerate development and empower people all over the world to build amazing things. I have built a career on OSS, and millions of others have as well. It is a game changer.
However, that is not really what I want to discuss here.
As long as I have been involved in open source, I have dealt with FUD about OSS from investors, executives, and business people who don’t “get it”. These folks have usually been highly resistant to open sourcing code or making contributions because they think it will hurt the business. “Why would I want to share code that can be used to compete against us?” This could even apply to a young engineer or maintainer of a growing open-source project who’s deciding to startup and thinking whether to build an OSS company.
We have seen a huge boom in open source business models, and this is a GREAT thing. But, what can we do to ensure that we don’t prove the naysayers right?
My concern is that as we see a rise in competition among open source businesses, we will also see a rise in competitive businesses (open source and proprietary) that use previous work to accelerate their advantage… which is one of the central features to open source.
But, in theory, open source also has advantages for those who provide code - attribution, contribution, funding, shared resources, etc. There are also different licensing models that have strengths and weaknesses. We decided to go with a permissive license so that people can use Appsmith in all environments, and sometimes this works against us because competitors can build on top of Appsmith. But hey, that’s the nature of the game right?
So - what can we or should we do as a community to ensure that open source business models can be successful without tarnishing the reputation of open source in general? Should we be more clear with attribution? Should we partner and make shared libraries for common functionality? Maybe do nothing? What do you think?
Thanks for your comment. co-founder of Openblocks here.
To provide some background info, there are 19 files containing code from Appsmith currently, all of them are about data source integration and have been added the corresponding apache license text.
I'm a super fan of open-source software. Nowadays no software can be built without the dependency on open-source projects.
Openblocks have a direct dependency on dozens of open source projects, I'm grateful to all of them and I don't think using them harms the reputation of open source, instead, this is what makes OSS prosperous.
I was an Appsmith user and the project helped me a lot on building tools, I really appreciate that you maintain such a great project. But building web apps has a big scope, I don't think the story ends here. One of the things that makes Retool/Appsmith stand out is their developer-friendly nature, but there are also many limitations compared to developer-first frameworks like React/Vue. We start a new project because there are so many potentials and possibilities that need to be explored.
Speaking of shared libraries, I think it's a fantastic idea. It will be amazing if we can maintain a common data source/integration library together. There are so many platforms out there that need integration features.
Though, finding the right abstraction for integration is a little tricky. We are working on an protocol and will provide all the integration source codes of Openblocks with a more permissive license. Hopefully, other platforms can benefit from it and be able to spend more time on innovation instead of repetitive work.
open block definitely uses some of appsmith and retool's code. You can use the IDEA to do your own the functions, but please do not COPY & PASTE. Don't be copycat.
Looks promising for sure! I know its hard to fund etc. but it'd be nice if truly 100% open-source options existed! Even the ones that are open-source, then have pricing for SSO etc. which is disappointing. I see the same in the headless CMS space where tools like Strapi, make it very hard to adopt without paying $$$.
I feel like charging for SSO is a reasonable request of enterprises when adopting open source software. Most enterprises require SSO as policy (and should). Most enterprises also don't contribute financially to the sustainability of open source software, so this is one way to ensure that happens.
Founder of https://interval.com here. We're somewhere in-between Retool and Windmill which was mentioned on this thread.
Like Windmill, Interval is heavily code-focused. Our model lets you define tools in your existing TypeScipt/JavaScript codebase.
Like Retool, you can use Interval to build complete internal dashboards that handle the "view stuff" side of things, not just the script/workflow "do stuff" pieces.
Founder of Bracket, YCW22 (https://www.usebracket.com/) here. You can use us to set up internal tools in Airtable, G Sheets, or Notion using 1-way and 2-way syncs.
Another one I'm trying out is Grist. They have Python scripting for functions and their way of viewing multiple tables on one screen is helpful. So far I'm liking it, although it misses some things like prefiltered referential selection boxes, and I would like more entry validation for deployment to typical internal end users. They're also not great at marketing themselves.
I looked at Budibase but it doesn't offer self-referencing table relationships and the CSV import process doesn't seem to support updates as cleanly as Grist. And the interface seemed kind of sluggish to me.
You should try ILLA. It's also an open-source low-code platform, and it's very stable. We are developing new features and iterating very fast. Try ILLA and let me know if you experience any inconvenience, and we will put all the advice into our next version plan. (https://github.com/illa-family/illa-builder)
An ideal alternative to Retool. We offer an intuitive drag drop interface with 150+ pre-built UI components and you can also connect with any database of your choice and build admin panels, dashboards, or any kind of web and mobile apps.
The best part is you can choose what suits you the best between user-based pricing or usage based pricing.
Tooljet IMO is the most promising of the open-source Retool competitors. It has a great UI, is easy to use, plugs into everything, and is super flexible. If you haven't checked out out lately, I highly recommend it.
Hi, I'm the lead dev of Saltcorn (https://saltcorn.com), I built it around the relational data model and it may fit your use case. Some people are finding it useful!
These things keep popping up left and right. I can think of atleast 6 no-code / low-code platforms all focussed on internal tools. Somehow they are all profitable, retool a bit more since it went to a "better school". Interesting space.
Let's try out ILLA! I am one of the team members of ILLA. It's very stable and easy to use. (https://github.com/illacloud/illa-builder) let me know if you have any concerns or questions!
I'm a Retool user and going to try writing a script now...
Edit: hmmm, it's pretty hard. I was trying to export a pretty simple app but it looks like there's a ton of features not supported here. (I guess it's pretty hard to build a full development environment with GUIs.) For example, I have a simple table in Retool where I'm doing inline editing. Unfortunately Openblock's table is read-only. So I guess I'll have to manually add a form. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to easily add validations to the form, and it seemed a bit buggy when submitting it too (maybe not properly debouncing?). Also, it looks like the permissioning system is much more rigid, and doesn't support, for example, showing different things in the app depending on the user group?
Looking forward to seeing it mature, but it does feel like there is a lot of surface area. I've tried a few other OSS builders, and I think Retool still comes out ahead when it comes to building actual production use cases. Like another comment said, I do wonder whether there will ever be a true OSS version? Seems like everything is "free for now, will charge for enterprise features later". At that point you might as well just use Retool, since the product is a lot better?
It’s great to see more options out there, though...
> Your current browser may have compatibility issues. For a better user experience, it is recommended to use the latest version of the Chrome browser.
Huh, it’s been a few years since I saw a banner like this other than on a tech demo that was deliberately using cutting-edge stuff. Hmm… honestly, probably eight or ten years ago.
Quite apart from the fact of the banner’s existence at all, its wording displeases me. Recommending a single browser in such a situation is bad.
Sorry about Firefox flagging issue, currently we are on a very tight schedule on developing new features, so we only do a thorough test on Chrome then. We welcome our community to give us feedback about browser compatibility issues and we'll fix this Firefox issue soon.
I tried quickly the app builder with Firefox and it seemed to mostly work fine. I would bet it's just that the devs use chrome and didn't have time to test extensively all their advanced features on all browsers.
I use Retool extensively at work for internal tooling (A.K.A Backoffice). It's really good in that I don't have to think about it much. There seems to be a new open-source competitor popping up every month, which is great, but I really wish people would get behind one or two of them and make them much stronger contenders.
The comparisons listed (other than being OSS) are mostly superficial and in some cases already available in Retool, perhaps released since that was written.
I'm an ex-palantir (left 3y ago, things might have changed) that worked on Foundry and building Windmill [1] which is an open-source framework that would actually be closer to Foundry except we do workflows and not data pipelines.
I do not think the comparison stands between Retool, or this tool and Foundry. There is indeed a sub-product in Foundry called 'Slate' which is an UI builder but it's a small part of Foundry. Foundry is mostly about data pipelines, to do spark transforms on large ETL, and then having lots of product on top of it to make it easy to make Spark work in an enterprise environment such as a UI builder (the slate mentioned above), a graph viewer of the ETL (monocle), a report builder, RBAC, a timeseries processor, data lineage, versioning of the code, a webeditor and so on.
It's very hard to understand what Foundry actually is from the provided landing page. Would you be able to describe it? Is it like Retool, but with more data sources and blocks? Can you actually drag-n-drop new applications in it or it's customized by Palantir only?
I agree, the website is terrible at explaining what it is, I only got it by seeing it fully implemented in a business. It's too broad to describe here but this might help: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uF-GSj-Exms
We're still in the exploration of ideas at this point. Eventually that will happen, but I think there's a lot of room to explore before converging on the best implementations.
Congrats on the launch! The app builder looks amazing and seems indeed very inspired by Retool.
We are building a tool in the same space with Windmill, also open-source [1]. The goal is not to hijack this thread since I do not believe we are that competitive.
We focus on workflows and more backendy/complex logic by converting automatically Python, Typescript, Go, Bash into endpoints and workflow modules that you can run at scale on workers that are deployable on one's own infra. We are currently also finishing an UI builder [2] but because it is not our prime focus, it will always be a much simpler alternative to what you and Retool are building. Hence, I see a lot of potential for integrations/collaboration for users with need of UIs similar to retool while needing more complex logic than REST or raw database queries.
In any case, congrats, I have played with the tool and you guys did an amazing job.
All of these "internal tool builders" don't excite me as much as the concept of a "saas building builder" - I think https://saasrock.com (bias since I'm helping) has unique potential.
They are very different use cases. Retool & the like are for building stuff used by yourself/your company. You can connect to internal data sources/APIs and build dashboards. SaaS builders are for building your app for a broader audience. They mainly offer features like authentication, user management, CRM, marketing, subscriptions, billing.
This is cool and in some world where the company becomes massive and basically commit to properly maintaining the product I could see it being a player.
I'm skeptical of open-sourcing UI and workflow builders.
The upsides are that you enable a community to build connectors and the UI builder + maintain them, but the downside is that you have to manage the community well enough that enterprises can trust the connectors and the UI builder. The challenge of maintaining the community + maintaining some sort of an SLA is very hard. This type of software is extremely hard to test for –writing integration tests are much harder for the frontend than they are for something like a database (e.g. MongoDB) because of the permutations of use-cases). The OSS+managed model seems to have succeeded in areas where very you can regression tests are much easier to maintain and there are clear benchmarks to test the community's output against.
As a buyer (we recently bought SuperBlocks (https://www.superblocks.com/) which is just a managed version of the same idea) it's hard to commit to an open-source version of something like this given the problems above. I may be totally wrong – I've never run an OSS+managed business, and as much as I love the ethos, I still have to not care about the stability of an internal tool builder that my company is being built on top of.
You have a good point about enterprise requirements and the challenge of wrapping an SLA around open source which is entirely or primarily made from community contributions. I ran into this all the time when I worked at Acquia which provides a platform for Drupal.
One thing to note - proprietary does not necessarily mean it is any safer or more stable than OSS. Superblocks is actually a closed source fork of Appsmith, so the code is very close to the open source version, but now it is not visible.
In my experience, proprietary vs OSS is not the issue, but maturity and support.
Most newer software either has undiscovered bugs, or develops them as they grow and become complex. More mature software tends to be more stable in general, and OSS projects with commercial backing tend to have the resources (and incentive) to focus on security and stability.
This is why I am so interested in the explosion of Open Source business models. In theory, it provides a more stable product and commercial support, while still being transparent about its code and being open to community contributions.
necatiozmen|3 years ago
Repo: https://github.com/refinedev/refine
It is headless by default and supports Material UI, AntDesign, Chakra UI, and Mantine.
It also has connectors for 15+ backend services including REST API, GraphQL, NestJs CRUD, Airtable, Strapi, Strapi v4, Strapi GraphQL, Supabase, Hasura, Nhost, Appwrite, Firebase..
You can compare with Retool and other similar tools https://refine.dev/docs/comparison/
vicsomething|3 years ago
hipjiveguy|3 years ago
rlnorthcutt|3 years ago
In full transparency, I am the Head of DevRel at Appsmith, which is an alternative tool to Open Blocks, and a source for some of Open Block’s code (https://github.com/openblocks-dev/openblocks/search?q=appsmi...).
However, that is not really what I want to discuss here.
As long as I have been involved in open source, I have dealt with FUD about OSS from investors, executives, and business people who don’t “get it”. These folks have usually been highly resistant to open sourcing code or making contributions because they think it will hurt the business. “Why would I want to share code that can be used to compete against us?” This could even apply to a young engineer or maintainer of a growing open-source project who’s deciding to startup and thinking whether to build an OSS company.
We have seen a huge boom in open source business models, and this is a GREAT thing. But, what can we do to ensure that we don’t prove the naysayers right?
My concern is that as we see a rise in competition among open source businesses, we will also see a rise in competitive businesses (open source and proprietary) that use previous work to accelerate their advantage… which is one of the central features to open source.
But, in theory, open source also has advantages for those who provide code - attribution, contribution, funding, shared resources, etc. There are also different licensing models that have strengths and weaknesses. We decided to go with a permissive license so that people can use Appsmith in all environments, and sometimes this works against us because competitors can build on top of Appsmith. But hey, that’s the nature of the game right?
So - what can we or should we do as a community to ensure that open source business models can be successful without tarnishing the reputation of open source in general? Should we be more clear with attribution? Should we partner and make shared libraries for common functionality? Maybe do nothing? What do you think?
shuaihan|3 years ago
To provide some background info, there are 19 files containing code from Appsmith currently, all of them are about data source integration and have been added the corresponding apache license text.
I'm a super fan of open-source software. Nowadays no software can be built without the dependency on open-source projects. Openblocks have a direct dependency on dozens of open source projects, I'm grateful to all of them and I don't think using them harms the reputation of open source, instead, this is what makes OSS prosperous.
I was an Appsmith user and the project helped me a lot on building tools, I really appreciate that you maintain such a great project. But building web apps has a big scope, I don't think the story ends here. One of the things that makes Retool/Appsmith stand out is their developer-friendly nature, but there are also many limitations compared to developer-first frameworks like React/Vue. We start a new project because there are so many potentials and possibilities that need to be explored.
Speaking of shared libraries, I think it's a fantastic idea. It will be amazing if we can maintain a common data source/integration library together. There are so many platforms out there that need integration features. Though, finding the right abstraction for integration is a little tricky. We are working on an protocol and will provide all the integration source codes of Openblocks with a more permissive license. Hopefully, other platforms can benefit from it and be able to spend more time on innovation instead of repetitive work.
vicsomething|3 years ago
alexthon87|3 years ago
naj1n|3 years ago
yyds8964|3 years ago
[deleted]
fulafel|3 years ago
renewiltord|3 years ago
chachra|3 years ago
jroes|3 years ago
vicsomething|3 years ago
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donqu1xote1|3 years ago
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amendegree|3 years ago
We've been looking for a good all in one internal tool builder, gonna invesitage this now.
Anyone have any other alt's they found useful?
alexarena|3 years ago
Like Windmill, Interval is heavily code-focused. Our model lets you define tools in your existing TypeScipt/JavaScript codebase.
Like Retool, you can use Interval to build complete internal dashboards that handle the "view stuff" side of things, not just the script/workflow "do stuff" pieces.
ianyanusko|3 years ago
mediaman|3 years ago
I looked at Budibase but it doesn't offer self-referencing table relationships and the CSV import process doesn't seem to support updates as cleanly as Grist. And the interface seemed kind of sluggish to me.
jerryxumaomao|3 years ago
Aaikansh22|3 years ago
An ideal alternative to Retool. We offer an intuitive drag drop interface with 150+ pre-built UI components and you can also connect with any database of your choice and build admin panels, dashboards, or any kind of web and mobile apps. The best part is you can choose what suits you the best between user-based pricing or usage based pricing.
For more details > https://www.dronahq.com/retool-alternative/
tylersgordon|3 years ago
petilon|3 years ago
glutamate|3 years ago
Closi|3 years ago
Rafsark|3 years ago
abdhass|3 years ago
rubenfiszel|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
fdeth|3 years ago
donqu1xote1|3 years ago
[deleted]
thecleaner|3 years ago
pragmatick|3 years ago
AlphaWeaver|3 years ago
blacksoil|3 years ago
Multrex|3 years ago
foxbee|3 years ago
https://github.com/Budibase/budibase
jerryxumaomao|3 years ago
raviparikh|3 years ago
shuaihan|3 years ago
devdiary|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
donqu1xote1|3 years ago
[deleted]
datalopers|3 years ago
antonyl|3 years ago
Edit: hmmm, it's pretty hard. I was trying to export a pretty simple app but it looks like there's a ton of features not supported here. (I guess it's pretty hard to build a full development environment with GUIs.) For example, I have a simple table in Retool where I'm doing inline editing. Unfortunately Openblock's table is read-only. So I guess I'll have to manually add a form. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to easily add validations to the form, and it seemed a bit buggy when submitting it too (maybe not properly debouncing?). Also, it looks like the permissioning system is much more rigid, and doesn't support, for example, showing different things in the app depending on the user group?
Looking forward to seeing it mature, but it does feel like there is a lot of surface area. I've tried a few other OSS builders, and I think Retool still comes out ahead when it comes to building actual production use cases. Like another comment said, I do wonder whether there will ever be a true OSS version? Seems like everything is "free for now, will charge for enterprise features later". At that point you might as well just use Retool, since the product is a lot better?
It’s great to see more options out there, though...
CSDude|3 years ago
_justlilian|3 years ago
How do you plan to fund it?
vinibrito|3 years ago
upen946|3 years ago
I know how much effort it takes to build something like this. Good luck!!
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
truetraveller|3 years ago
shuaihan|3 years ago
xnorswap|3 years ago
Disappointing to see Firefox flagged as a "Not supported browser".
chrismorgan|3 years ago
Huh, it’s been a few years since I saw a banner like this other than on a tech demo that was deliberately using cutting-edge stuff. Hmm… honestly, probably eight or ten years ago.
Quite apart from the fact of the banner’s existence at all, its wording displeases me. Recommending a single browser in such a situation is bad.
neon_balcony|3 years ago
Sorry about Firefox flagging issue, currently we are on a very tight schedule on developing new features, so we only do a thorough test on Chrome then. We welcome our community to give us feedback about browser compatibility issues and we'll fix this Firefox issue soon.
londons_explore|3 years ago
rubenfiszel|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
afhammad|3 years ago
The comparisons listed (other than being OSS) are mostly superficial and in some cases already available in Retool, perhaps released since that was written.
A better benchmark to aim for would be https://www.palantir.com/platforms/foundry/ which is way more powerful.
rubenfiszel|3 years ago
I do not think the comparison stands between Retool, or this tool and Foundry. There is indeed a sub-product in Foundry called 'Slate' which is an UI builder but it's a small part of Foundry. Foundry is mostly about data pipelines, to do spark transforms on large ETL, and then having lots of product on top of it to make it easy to make Spark work in an enterprise environment such as a UI builder (the slate mentioned above), a graph viewer of the ETL (monocle), a report builder, RBAC, a timeseries processor, data lineage, versioning of the code, a webeditor and so on.
[1]: https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill
sevazhidkov|3 years ago
afhammad|3 years ago
I agree, the website is terrible at explaining what it is, I only got it by seeing it fully implemented in a business. It's too broad to describe here but this might help: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uF-GSj-Exms
ebiester|3 years ago
Aeolun|3 years ago
kyleblarson|3 years ago
vladsanchez|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
donqu1xote1|3 years ago
[deleted]
rubenfiszel|3 years ago
We are building a tool in the same space with Windmill, also open-source [1]. The goal is not to hijack this thread since I do not believe we are that competitive.
We focus on workflows and more backendy/complex logic by converting automatically Python, Typescript, Go, Bash into endpoints and workflow modules that you can run at scale on workers that are deployable on one's own infra. We are currently also finishing an UI builder [2] but because it is not our prime focus, it will always be a much simpler alternative to what you and Retool are building. Hence, I see a lot of potential for integrations/collaboration for users with need of UIs similar to retool while needing more complex logic than REST or raw database queries.
In any case, congrats, I have played with the tool and you guys did an amazing job.
[1]: https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill [2]: https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill/pull/886
Brajeshwar|3 years ago
Even for the simplest and my own sites, I usually typed it out in the browser and copy-paste. :-)
raju|3 years ago
https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill
(Or @rubenfiszel could edit their post)
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
pvsukale3|3 years ago
https://github.com/ToolJet/ToolJet
tylersgordon|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
ckluis|3 years ago
paxys|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
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p10jkle|3 years ago
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unknown|3 years ago
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unknown|3 years ago
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T3RMINATED|3 years ago
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jerryxumaomao|3 years ago
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Nimsical|3 years ago
I'm skeptical of open-sourcing UI and workflow builders.
The upsides are that you enable a community to build connectors and the UI builder + maintain them, but the downside is that you have to manage the community well enough that enterprises can trust the connectors and the UI builder. The challenge of maintaining the community + maintaining some sort of an SLA is very hard. This type of software is extremely hard to test for –writing integration tests are much harder for the frontend than they are for something like a database (e.g. MongoDB) because of the permutations of use-cases). The OSS+managed model seems to have succeeded in areas where very you can regression tests are much easier to maintain and there are clear benchmarks to test the community's output against.
As a buyer (we recently bought SuperBlocks (https://www.superblocks.com/) which is just a managed version of the same idea) it's hard to commit to an open-source version of something like this given the problems above. I may be totally wrong – I've never run an OSS+managed business, and as much as I love the ethos, I still have to not care about the stability of an internal tool builder that my company is being built on top of.
rlnorthcutt|3 years ago
One thing to note - proprietary does not necessarily mean it is any safer or more stable than OSS. Superblocks is actually a closed source fork of Appsmith, so the code is very close to the open source version, but now it is not visible.
In my experience, proprietary vs OSS is not the issue, but maturity and support.
Most newer software either has undiscovered bugs, or develops them as they grow and become complex. More mature software tends to be more stable in general, and OSS projects with commercial backing tend to have the resources (and incentive) to focus on security and stability.
This is why I am so interested in the explosion of Open Source business models. In theory, it provides a more stable product and commercial support, while still being transparent about its code and being open to community contributions.
jokethrowaway|3 years ago