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Show HN: Budibase – An open-source low code platform

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Re: Show HN: Budibase – An open-source low code platform

#41

Post by jimiljojo »

foxbee wrote: post #32
jimiljojo wrote: post #30

congrats! I work in a similar space, and this looks promising. Suggestion for your marketing team - the promo demo is great, but make it HD. The demo recording is pixelated on 4K res. You can do better :) Good luck!

Cheers - where did you watch the promo video? We use wistia for the website, but you can view it on youtube too. Is this any better: https://youtu.be/xoljVpty_Kw

that is the one I watched. See screenshot https://imgur.com/a/4NNv1vN

The postgres fields are barely visible. I was also looking at the website templates for the score card. The screens get blurry there too. I might use the template ;) https://budibase.com/business-apps/templates/hashicorp-score...

Re: Show HN: Budibase – An open-source low code platform

#42

Post by foxbee »

CGamesPlay wrote: post #37
foxbee wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What version of safari are you on?

Version 14.1.2 (14611.3.10.1.7)

Strange - Safari supports Webp in v14. Also, I've tested the website on two computers, both Safari v14 and they appear. Apologies for this and thanks for letting us know. I'll keep digging.

Re: Show HN: Budibase – An open-source low code platform

#43

Post by spmurrayzzz »

I attempted to use this a few months ago to prototype a unified ticketing solution (just an experiment to see if it would be worth adopting for small internal apps) using pre-existing mongo data. Seems super early to use this for anything serious in my view.

TL;DR - It ended up being orders of magnitude faster for me to just build it from scratch.

One of the biggest general UX issues I encountered was how data sources & queries are defined in the UI, and then how they're bound in the WSYWIG editor. It wasn't immediately obvious and the docs are pretty lean. In most cases, I'd just prefer a config file vs doing everything via the UI.

I like the idea and how flexible it aims to be generally, but its in very early stages right now.

(Small aside: There was also a showstopper mongo bug as well that would have prevented me from moving forward with the tool even if I liked it. It was a simple async issue, 11 line diff to fix, but took months to merge.)

Re: Show HN: Budibase – An open-source low code platform

#44

Post by shogunpurple »

spmurrayzzz wrote: post #43

I attempted to use this a few months ago to prototype a unified ticketing solution (just an experiment to see if it would be worth adopting for small internal apps) using pre-existing mongo data. Seems super early to use this for anything serious in my view. TL;DR - It ended up being orders of magnitude faster for me to just build it from scratch. One of the biggest general UX issues I encountered was how data source…

Hi, thanks for the feedback, sorry to hear you had some problems.

The Mongo connector in general could probably do with some love - there's a few features in mongo such as projections that budibase does not support. We'd love to know more about what you were trying to build and how we could help you achieve it.

We move quickly, however, and the platform has come a long way in even a few months. We hope you try the platform again soon and continue to provide feedback as to where it could be improved.

Docs are a big focus for us over the coming months and they will see significant improvement in short order.

Thanks again!

Re: Show HN: Budibase – An open-source low code platform

#45

Post by mjashanks »

Multrex wrote: post #40

What's the difference between Budibase and AppSmith and what is the benefit to switch my apps from AppSmith to Budibase?

TLDR; AppSmith and Budibase are quite different platforms, but with significant overlap.

Budibase is meant to be used by IT Professionals (sysadmins, dbas, IT managers, PMs, developers). AppSmith is more targeted at developers. Because of this, Budibase has much less of a reliance on code - we like to say “code optional”.

Also, you will see us talk more about “Business apps”, rather than “Internal Tools”. A Budibase app is a real, single-page application - which you would happily give out to external users and folks in other departments who do not need to know your team’s internal processes. The apps are also responsive by default.

Another differentiator is that Budibase comes packaged with a database (runs on CouchDB). This makes creating new applications easy - without having to spin up another DB. We also offer 1st class support for SQL Databases - Budibase will automatically fetch your tables and automate the basic INSERT, UPDATE, SELECT and DELETE statements (like an ORM).

If you want to place us in the overall low-code landscape, we are more like an open-source Powerapps/Mendix/OutSystems. I sometimes say (half-jokingly) that Budibase is what would happen if Retool and Stacker had an open-source baby.

Re: Show HN: Budibase – An open-source low code platform

#47

Post by spmurrayzzz »

shogunpurple wrote: post #44
spmurrayzzz wrote: post #43

I attempted to use this a few months ago to prototype a unified ticketing solution (just an experiment to see if it would be worth adopting for small internal apps) using pre-existing mongo data. Seems super early to use this for anything serious in my view. TL;DR - It ended up being orders of magnitude faster for me to just build it from scratch. One of the biggest general UX issues I encountered was how data source…

Hi, thanks for the feedback, sorry to hear you had some problems. The Mongo connector in general could probably do with some love - there's a few features in mongo such as projections that budibase does not support. We'd love to know more about what you were trying to build and how we could help you achieve it. We move quickly, however, and the platform has come a long way in even a few months. We hope you try the pl…

I'd be happy to help out on the mongo side if you'd like. Maybe some github issues with a related label to help triage those issues would be helpful for folks to lend a hand.

I'll concede that no/low-code solutions have never historically worked out at my organization (context: I am cofounder and director of engineering at a wireless ISP). Theres always a set of tradeoffs that make it really hard to deliver value when you're dealing with business domain constraints that are hard to generalize.

That said, I am always willing to give things a fair shot and have a long list of small use cases that I use for prototyping when I go down that rabbit hole.

Re: Show HN: Budibase – An open-source low code platform

#48

Post by segphault »

Installing the budibase server from npm pulls in over a thousand transitive dependencies. The npm install command reports that there are 39 known vulnerabilities in budibase's dependencies, including 9 that are classed "high" and 3 that are "critical" severity.

The dependency graph includes a lot of crap, like packages containing trivial single-line functions like "is-object" and "is-stream". That's a very large attack surface considering the poor security practices in the npm ecosystem[0] and the growing frequency of attacks on transitive dependencies[1].

I'm interested in hearing from the creators what steps they take to audit their transitive dependencies in order to prevent this application from being compromised. Given that a tool like this would typically be given privileged access to internal data sources, it seems like a tempting target. I don't think I'd be comfortable using this in production.

[0]: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/52-percent-of... [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28962168

Re: Show HN: Budibase – An open-source low code platform

#50

Post by mjashanks »

oezi wrote: post #38
mjashanks wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We haven’t yet worked out out our pricing model for Budibase Cloud. However, it will most likely be user-based / per seat - similar to platforms like Retool & Airtable.

Such pricing models would prevent any kind of resale for most products. Please at least consider a pricing model which allows for something like 1 USD per MAU, for instance if data isn't shared between users (could a SaaS be build on budibase which cost 10 USD per month to the end-user).

I hear you! Budibase is not meant for building a SaaS product. However, it's good for "Customer Portals" - whereby you are giving access to external users. This is a problem for per-seat pricing, but there are ways to solve it.

We've thought about pricing per MAU. The difficulty is that we would always be charging for last month's usage, rather than more predictable upfront charging. Also - coming up with an exact definition of "active" is not trivial!

Thanks for the feedback!

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