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.
I really appreciate you taking the time to share! The inclusion of the Appsmith name and license on the code used is a great example of how we can be more transparent and ensure proper attribution. Clearly, your team has given careful thought to this topic as well.
There are always so many ways to solve problems, and lots of approaches that are optimized for specific users, tech stacks, industries, etc. Personally, I find so much more value in the exploration of new ideas and different decisions (as you have done) than simply being a "clone" of another tool.
As we move more into this new space, the ability to share libraries and integration patterns could be super useful for us all. I'll be sure to highlight that internally!
While I think it is important to share new projects and even brag a bit about our own, I'm not clear on how this adds to the conversation? Illa has been mentioned multiple times here, so at this point it feels a bit spammy. As a developer, I feel like a little bit of self-promotion goes a long way. Hope this helps.
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.
Open source is open source. There is nothing wrong with using and reusing open source code as long as it is within the bounds of the license. We have a permissive license for Appsmith on purpose - we want to share and inspire!
My question here is more about IF or HOW we, as a community, should improve how we reuse or extend open source code for commercial projects. I am very open to hearing all ideas - thanks.
Can you expand on that a bit more? Do you think that more open source business models will lead to more rehashing of the same code/concepts over an over again?
I'm also curious how you think this may apply to the rise in AI coding projects. In theory, it will become possible to create complex software by simply describing it well, and much of that code from the AI training is open source.
First, it's gorgeous to be the first open-source alternative to xxx in different industry segments. In comparison, it's just commercial competition that more and more OSS alternatives to the same project.
Then, it's difficult for me to have a good discussion with u on the AI coding project. There are so many problems, such as licenses, trademarks, and secrets of contribution behind AI coding.
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.
The problem is that everyone should have SSO, and that includes small orgs.
If you don't want your stuff used by small orgs that can't afford to pay, that's a totally reasonable standpoint. At the same time, though, if it's good they probably will use it despite not having SSO, and so that decision makessecurity (something that, by and large, benefits everyone) into an opt-in luxury good. Speaking only for me, I'd be uncomfortable espousing that as a philosophy.
I agree that orgs of all sizes should use SSO. The pricing should scale appropriately.
But as we have seen, companies are not doing enough to secure the sustainability of the open source software they rely on for their businesses, and I think a balance needs to be struck.
One thing that Appsmith does is to offer Google and Github SSO for the open source version, and then SAML, OIDC, OAuth2 for the business edition. It can be very difficult to figure out where to draw the line, but I think looking at the needs of the individual developer vs a business team of devs is a good start.
SSO isn't where to try to bleed that pig though, I think, to the point where for team-based systems it is probably more proper to disallow anything else (and maybe make them pay for guest access outside of their domain!).
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)
Cloud service will be up online by the end of this year! You can try to self-host first! (https://github.com/illacloud/illa-builder)
Let me know if you have more questions!
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!
I just watched all the videos of Saltcorn on Youtube - and amongst the tools I researched so far this was most impressive. About to use it for a few internal tools soon.
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.
Some feedback, as you asked for it and I signed up for both OpenBlocks and Budibase cloud versions today to try them out:
(NB: If I like either or both of them I’ll self host, as I have no interest in SaaS, indeed it’s what’s stopped me from using things like Retool despite missing RAD tools ever since Delphi stopped being a viable solution for me.)
OpenBlocks dropped me quickly into its pretty snappy app (literally just connected Github and done) and I was away and designing a simple screen in no time. Budibase on the other hand asked me a bunch of questions about my “company” and job, then dumped me straight into a wizard to create or connect to a database.
It felt like ages before I could start clicking and playing around. I nearly gave up and left at least twice and in fact ended up only trying the actual tools in Budibase out for a much shorter time as a result. Maybe I’ll go back to it later, but I’m already planning to deploy an OpenBlocks instance to mess around with more.
I massively prefer the OpenBlocks approach here. I want to be dropped quickly into a powerful and intuitive tool, not taken through a signup and data harvesting flow nor invited to create an app through a series of wizards. From what I see Budibase looks promising and it seems to have some features that OpenBlocks doesn’t (though the app also felt a bit less snappy than OpenBlocks and speed is really important), but the general experience as a new user was a bit much.
Thanks for the feedback. I really appreciate it. You don't have to go through that flow. You can just use the docs and run it using digital ocean, docker, linode, kubernetes...
But! We are updating our onboarding to be quicker. In re to app perf, it's a little surprising. It's an area we don't get much neg feedback on so I'm happy you reported it. I'll feed this back to the team.
Thanks for the response. I'll definitely give it a proper look and try out self hosting. It's actually quite nice that you have a "Budibase DB" option which might come in really handy compared with OpenBlocks.
And yeah, I realise I could just self host immediately but I wanted to use the cloud version to decide whether to make that effort and that was where the flow sort of got in the way (though I wonder now if there might have been an option to cancel it earlier or skip it that I missed…).
Re: the perf, I honestly don't think it is all that bad, but interactions just felt a bit less instant straight after using OpenBlocks. It might even just have been the animations in the UI giving that feeling :)
EDIT: actually, a couple of examples of the performance difference I have just noticed are:
1. The speed the selection outlines of the components follow the mouse hover in the designer.
2. The speed of updates of the designer when properties are changed, for example OpenBlocks both updates the text of a text element in real time and does it nearly instantly, whereas Budibase waits for pressing enter (which I think is fine) and has a noticeable delay. The delays seems to be there with all property edits. It feels like perhaps a server round trip vs optimistically updating the display locally, but is definitely noticeable.
(I work at Retool.) We offer a self-hosted version of Retool if you're interested: https://retool.com/self-hosted/ The self-hosted option is also free for teams of up to 5 people under our new free plan.
Budibase is my next option until they implement full drag and drop functionality. Also one thing that stopped me from using budibase now is: "pagination not working on tables which use queries or relationship data". Other tools can handle something similar.
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!
Appsmith you can't create good looking apps and the responsiveness is not good. Tooljet is good but it didn't click me. Basically I'm not developer but i know good SQL and WordPress. I really want something like Elementor page builder but with low code functionalities.
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.
No, just remove the banner and check, it’s totally misguided considering how far back their baseline apparently is. It’s a bad implementation of a bad concept.
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.
It's unfair to call the dev lazy on this ground. Even modern browsers are far better than the old days, there remain many discrepancies between browsers and they are still hard to come up with solutions that fit all platforms.
Making a static web page work on different browsers is much easier than making a web app work on all the browsers. For a web app, even 1% of the API doesn't work, the whole app is a failure. Can you accept an app only work 99% of the time?
I've no idea what makes it incompatible with Firefox, but without knowing the reason, it's an offence to call it laziness.
> I've no idea what makes it incompatible with Firefox, but without knowing the reason, it's an offence to call it laziness.
If they didn't bother documenting the compatibility issues, even if only so that future roadmaps can review and take stock of any changes in browser functionality down the road -- or to allow others to work on/around the problem, that's laziness and it's fair to call it out as such.
100% on this. Most startups are limited in resources, and even more so for opensource. Building a business means setting expectations and being clear on the scope of support. This is more than appropriate for a new product.
Personally, I would rather have a warning that FF "may" have issues, than no warning at all. Nothing is stopping a user form using FF if they want, and now they have a heads up.
As a long time open source user and contributor, I find it disappointing when some people can become entitled and complain about free software that doesn't exactly meet their expectations.
As mentioned elsewhere, the fact that it is open source means that anyone can potentially contribute... so if it is a large issue, then there is nothing stopping folks from trying to solve the problem themselves.
yeah, why is firefox lagging behind? well you are stupid to use firefox, i only use muh brave, it blocks ads by default and gives you crypto in return to show their ads.
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.
I've not used Foundry myself but I've been given a demo of it fully implemented at a company.
I agree that the Retool comparison is only a small part of what Foundry offers, and that's my point, I don't know of any open source alternative that comes close to Foundry. They overlap in the sense that they are both tools that can be used as the back-office / operating system of a business, to varying degrees.
It's an interesting discussion. I of course agree with the sentiment and am convinced of the need for an open-source "operating systems" for enterprise and that's where we draw our inspiration from. However there is a big risk of both bloat and doing everything but not very well.
Foundry relies on Spark to do the actual ETL so they can focus on doing the products on top, the most interesting one is the integration with data lineage imho. But in practice, many business did not actually need big data since most of their ETL could run on top of a few non sharded sql queries on postgres. On the other hand, if you care about ETL there are a few amazing competing tools, dbt, airbyte, snowflake, the databricks platform and so on. And last, not being open-source is in my opinion a big risk for a large enterprises to bet and implement all their internal processes and golden tables on (or "ontologies" as palantir love saying). Even though Palantir would love to be product-led growth, their moat is strongly in their forward deployed engineer, half-consultant, half-software engineers that can push Foundry in big old-school companies and governments.
There is space for a new wave of less bloated, open-source tools and I for one am pretty excited about the new players in the field.
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.
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/