Show HN: Illa – An open-source alternative to Retool

Hey HNs:

This is Vincent from the ILLA team. I'm sure you guys see tons of "Open-source" and "Alternative to Retool" these days. I won't deny Retool is a great product, and so are many open-source competitors such as Appsmith, Budibase, Tooljet etc.

However, what makes ILLA so special? What advantages does ILLA have that allow users to choose ILLA instead of others?

Well, I would like to answer those questions to all folks at HN one by one.

First, we are similar to Retool, or Appsmith but we have many different our own features. We are a true open-source project all the folks here can check and review our Code here: https://github.com/illacloud/illa-builder. We believe as developers the basic ethic is to be honest, especially in "open-source" circumstances. You have to be honest with your team, users, and contributors in order to grow. Therefore, we welcome all the contributors from around the world to build ILLA together, this is a promising project and won't let you down. With your code, we can build the next DevTool together instead of just making some cash.

Ok, so maybe some folks here would say that I don't care about "Code Integrity", and there are many different options such as Appsmith, Budibase, and Tooljet. Why should I use ILLA here? Well, we believe the difference between animals and homo sapiens is that people know to use tools to improve their work efficiencies. Our whole team members are developer backgrounds and we know many itch issues we would like to solve for developers. So maybe our newest 1.3.3 version is not good enough, but just give us a little more time and I'm you will see the differences.

In the end, We are also "open-source" first. We are willing to collaborate with different open-source alternatives as much as we can. For example, we just partnered with PingCAP a few weeks ago. We will support many other open-source databases such as MindsDB, Supabase, etc soon. We can also support many other open-source alternatives, if you are interested, you can always find us in our Discord community.

Our Repo again: https://github.com/illacloud/illa-builder

Show HN: Illa – An open-source alternative to Retool
github.com

I've been curious why so many of these low-code dev tools target enterprise/business with internal apps. Can anyone shed some light on this? Thanks!

Is that really it? I thought maybe it was because of full control of their own database access. Makes it easy to integrate the code blocks with the data sources.

Everyone has It owns the best feature. They let developers work effectively together. Low-code tools need us to encourage and support~

Well, it's simply because with more employees there will be more problems. Each corporation has tons of different problems in internal management, and those problems can't be solved by just purchasing standard SaaS so they have to build on their own. Well in that case developers are very expensive and building some tools used only internally won't contribute to developers' achievement. So using a tool to build it faster really make sense.