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Launch HN: Refine (YC S23) – Open-source platform for enterprise web apps

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Launch HN: Refine (YC S23) – Open-source platform for enterprise web apps

#1
Hi HN! We’re the co-founders of Refine (https://github.com/refinedev/refine), an open-source platform for developing enterprise web applications rapidly. In one year since launch we have 15K active developers each month, and over 5K projects in production. Among the 5,000+ projects deployed to production, we see a lot of admin panels, dashboards, B2B portals and SAAS interfaces.

Check out our online generator at (https://refine.dev/#playground) to create a custom Refine application and download it.

Before starting refine, we spent five years as a consultancy company building internal-facing applications for enterprise clients. We have seen many complex use cases where the demanded flexibility was much higher than what existing low-code/no-code solutions provide. Moving away from rigid architectures and pre-made components that are difficult to customize, developers tend to start from the scratch. This results in a significant waste of time and resources.

In order to find a sweet spot between “starting from scratch” and higher level solutions, we started working on refine. After a couple of iterations, we came up with a “headless” solution, separating the UI-layer completely from the rest of the frontend logic. This allowed us to support multiple UI frameworks and custom designs out of the box.

We understand the importance of frontend developers working with the stack and tools they love and are familiar with. So, we have built our project creation wizard that allows developers to mix and match their technology stack when creating a project.

After 1.5 years of development with the great support of the open-source community, Refine has become a mature framework that allows developers to rapidly build enterprise applications and have 100% control over their projects.

While remaining unobtrusive, Refine still saves a lot of development resources by eliminating repetitive tasks such as CRUD operations, state management, routing, authentication, access control, and i18n. It’s also backend-agnostic and works with any APIs or services.

The best way to start Refine development is visiting our extensive documentation at (https://refine.dev/docs/). Here, you can also find tutorials and real-life examples to use as a starting point for your use case.

We had one successful Show HN earlier this year (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34515128), and have since had several major releases and added many more features.

Recently, we've released our enterprise edition featuring deployments, built-in security, backend integrations and auto-generated UI's. By expanding Refine's capabilities beyond the frontend, the enterprise edition offers a complete solution for the internal tooling requirements of larger organizations. To get more information, please see our pricing page: https://refine.dev/pricing/.

If you have any questions, ideas or suggestions please share them with us. The team will be here all day to answer. We look forward to all of your comments!

Re: Launch HN: Refine (YC S23) – Open-source platform for enterprise web apps

#6
post #2

Congrats on the launch! How does your product compare to Retool and other products in the space including the OSS ones (Appsmith, Windmill, Tooljet etc)?

Will also throw in react-admin there. React-admin is not the same space per se (it's basically a react framework, not a low/no code tool), but if I built an internal admin app in react-admin, what would you say the pros/cons are to moving to Refine?

Re: Launch HN: Refine (YC S23) – Open-source platform for enterprise web apps

#7

So could we use this with DynamoDB?

Hey, with our open-core, you can connect to any data source as long as it provides a Public API. In our Enterprise edition, however, we support Direct Database connections (PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, Oracle DB) and other integrations that cannot be used client-side (such as Salesforce, Slack, Stripe, etc.)

Re: Launch HN: Refine (YC S23) – Open-source platform for enterprise web apps

#8
post #5

This is pretty cool. I noticed in the flow I could choose which technologies to use. That's interesting because ReTool is fully hosted and abstracts that away. I could see this also being used to bootstrap regular sites at some point.

Thank you so much for your comment. We believe that the most valuable aspect is allowing developers to work in their own environment with the tools and integrations they prefer. We're very happy that we've been able to reflect this.

Re: Launch HN: Refine (YC S23) – Open-source platform for enterprise web apps

#10
I encountered several challenges with Refine v3 but it looks improved in v4 with the detached router and improved documentation, which I found often lacking. This still isn't as native as implementing all these features on your own though, you pretty much access everything through Refine-specific hooks and providers, so there is a learning curve. It's flexibility centric.
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