[HN Gopher] Show HN: Open-source alternative to Retool
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Show HN: Open-source alternative to Retool
Author : shuaihan
Score : 323 points
Date : 2022-11-14 12:20 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| p10jkle wrote:
| See also https://budibase.com/ https://www.appsmith.com/
| [deleted]
| Nimsical wrote:
| 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.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| Like for normal OSS you'll end up using a few massive projects
| which get maintained regularly and then write custom for
| everything else
| truetraveller wrote:
| pricing for the cloud version?
| shuaihan wrote:
| It's free for early adopters. We don't have pricing plan yet.
| hanniabu wrote:
| That's awesome, I think I'll definitely be using it for ove
| of my open source projects
| dzikimarian wrote:
| It's AGPL so might be bit hard to adapt outside of homelab
| (unless that's the intention for the free version).
| [deleted]
| ckluis wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| paxys wrote:
| 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.
| ckluis wrote:
| 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).
| afhammad wrote:
| 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.
|
| A better benchmark to aim for would be
| https://www.palantir.com/platforms/foundry/ which is way more
| powerful.
| [deleted]
| ebiester wrote:
| 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.
| rubenfiszel wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill
| afhammad wrote:
| 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.
| rubenfiszel wrote:
| 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.
| afhammad wrote:
| agreed. I'm gonna checkout windmill when i get a chance,
| thanks!
| afhammad wrote:
| @vladsanchez, @sevazhidkov, @Aeolun
|
| 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
| vladsanchez wrote:
| Foundry is no match to either of these tools, but it's not open
| source. Thanks for sharing!
| kyleblarson wrote:
| I use it pretty extensively as well. It just works and is
| cheap. Can't imagine using an open source alternative.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Foundry is a terrible comparison, if only for the fact that I
| still have no clue what it does after reading that page
| (something with analytics?)
| sevazhidkov wrote:
| 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?
| pvsukale3 wrote:
| Related: Tooljet is also an open source alternative to Retool
|
| https://github.com/ToolJet/ToolJet
| [deleted]
| T3RMINATED wrote:
| rubenfiszel wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill [2]:
| https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill/pull/886
| [deleted]
| raju wrote:
| Correct URL to windmill on GitHub
|
| https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill
|
| (Or @rubenfiszel could edit their post)
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| You missed an "l" with 1. https://github.com/windmill-
| labs/windmill/
|
| Even for the simplest and my own sites, I usually typed it out
| in the browser and copy-paste. :-)
| rubenfiszel wrote:
| fixed, thanks :)
| xnorswap wrote:
| https://github.com/openblocks-dev/openblocks/blob/1c5846d049...
|
| Disappointing to see Firefox flagged as a "Not supported
| browser".
| chrismorgan wrote:
| > _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.
| [deleted]
| neon_balcony wrote:
| Hi, co-founder of Openblocks here.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| londons_explore wrote:
| It's opensource. Build it, test it, send any fixes necessary,
| add a few CI tests to verify it keeps working, and then add it
| to the supported list.
| chrismorgan wrote:
| 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.
| rubenfiszel wrote:
| 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.
| xnorswap wrote:
| What advanced features would be supported by a 3 year old
| Safari, a 4 year old Chrome, but not by Firefox?
|
| It's a kind of laziness that does the open web great harm by
| putting unnecessary barriers in front of Firefox users when
| they shouldn't be there.
|
| Feature detection for any newer APIs is far better. If you
| know you rely on a particular API set then you can test for
| precisely that.
|
| Otherwise let browsers be instead of putting banners up
| recommending "best in IE". It just harms the web.
| sangnoir wrote:
| alvis wrote:
| 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.
| BeefWellington wrote:
| > 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.
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| 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.
|
| /s if you didn realize
| chachra wrote:
| 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 $$$.
| datalopers wrote:
| Can I import my JSON config export from Retool?
| CSDude wrote:
| Yes this would make switches much more possible
| antonyl wrote:
| I'm a Retool user and going to try writing a script now...
| amendegree wrote:
| 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?
| [deleted]
| glutamate wrote:
| 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!
| rubenfiszel wrote:
| Windmill.dev
| sumoboy wrote:
| This looks more like pipedream.com for automation scripts
| than a tool builder.
| Closi wrote:
| AppSmith!
| abdhass wrote:
| Budibase.com
| Rafsark wrote:
| Definitely recommend Windmill.dev!
| alexarena wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| ianyanusko wrote:
| 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.
| petilon wrote:
| If you want to build traditional forms: https://airforms.com
| Multrex wrote:
| 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.
| devdiary wrote:
| same question
| raviparikh wrote:
| What about Appsmith/Tooljet fell short for you?
| Multrex wrote:
| 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.
| shuaihan wrote:
| [deleted]
| foxbee wrote:
| 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
| kwerk wrote:
| Fwiw BigQuery support is what kept me from testing budibase
| and using retool for a project just 2 weeks ago.
| foxbee wrote:
| Ahhh. We have a plugin repo now and there's a plugin for
| BigQuery:
|
| https://github.com/marblekirby/budibase-big-query-plugin
| barnabee wrote:
| 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.
| krithix wrote:
| (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.
| foxbee wrote:
| 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.
| barnabee wrote:
| 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.
| Multrex wrote:
| 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
| foxbee wrote:
| Fwiw Budibase has drag and drop now (released a couple of
| weeks ago)
| sagaro wrote:
| I have been using budibase for pretty much all my internal
| tooling at an Ecom startup. it is pretty good for pretty much
| most usecases.
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