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Show HN: Open-source alternative to Retool

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Re: Show HN: Open-source alternative to Retool

#61

Post by paxys »

ckluis wrote: post #41

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.

Re: Show HN: Open-source alternative to Retool

#63

Post by alexarena »

amendegree wrote: post #39

This looks super promising. 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?

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.

Re: Show HN: Open-source alternative to Retool

#64

Post by barnabee »

foxbee wrote: post #30
Multrex wrote: post #12

Is it stable? I really want to ditch appsmith, tried ToolJet but didn't hook me. Yours look promising, i hope you continue the development of it.

Have you tried Budibase? For reference, I am the cofounder of Budibase and we're planning 2023 so I am super-eager for feedback. https://github.com/Budibase/budibase

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.

Re: Show HN: Open-source alternative to Retool

#65

Post by Nimsical »

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.

Re: Show HN: Open-source alternative to Retool

#67

Post by kyleblarson »

afhammad wrote: post #2

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 a…

I use it pretty extensively as well. It just works and is cheap. Can't imagine using an open source alternative.

Re: Show HN: Open-source alternative to Retool

#68

Post by ckluis »

paxys wrote: post #61
ckluis wrote: post #41

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.

I think of it differently. The internal tool building companies focus on 1 of the 3 legs of building.

1. building

2. marketing

3. managing

A lot of internal tools would be externally viable as well (not all).

Re: Show HN: Open-source alternative to Retool

#69

Post by foxbee »

Multrex wrote: post #52
foxbee wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried Budibase? For reference, I am the cofounder of Budibase and we're planning 2023 so I am super-eager for feedback. https://github.com/Budibase/budibase

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. https://github.com/Budibase/budibase/issues/6226 https://github.com/Budibase/budibase/issues/3974

Fwiw Budibase has drag and drop now (released a couple of weeks ago)

Re: Show HN: Open-source alternative to Retool

#70

Post by jokethrowaway »

Nimsical wrote: post #65

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 connector…

Like for normal OSS you'll end up using a few massive projects which get maintained regularly and then write custom for everything else
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