Open source alternative to Retool: Appsmith | Hacker News Reader

Open source alternative to Retool: Appsmith

github.com

76 pointsarey_abhishek10 comments

What are the differences between Appsmith and Retool?

- Multi page apps. We focus on allowing you to create multi page apps that are performant and don't force this by making you create a folder or use nested tabs

- Focused on building a pro-developer experience. Our goal is to make Appsmith closer to an IDE, which is reflected in our UI today. Soon you'll find a debugger and a code editor that will allow you to write code in a comfortable environment instead of small boxes spread out around the application.

- Complex workflows. For example instead of triggering what happens after API1 in an API, in appsmith you can configure this when the API is called in the widget. So when you click a button you can say {{ Input1.value === "" ? API1.run() ; API2.run() }}

We are actively building more integrations and features. Our current roadmap is here: https://github.com/appsmithorg/appsmith/projects

Hi HN! Excited to post about Appsmith. We built Appsmith because every company spends too much time building custom internal tools even though engineers don't like working on it.

There are a lot of low code products in the market, but none of them are open source. We believe an internal tool builder like Appsmith is part of you core tech stack and thus should be open source.

Can you elaborate on the differences between Appsmith and Retool from a feature standpoint?

hi! There are a few differences today:

1. You can make multi-page apps 2. You can create workflows by chaining events 3. Much better debugging features for datasources

More features are on their way. :)

Congrats it seems amazing, I will definitely try it soon :)

thank you!

This looks incredible! Well done! I get that it’s mainly aimed at internal tools and dashboards, but what kind of load can something like this handle? Could I conceivably use it for something customer facing? What about logins and security? Awesome work!

Load wise appsmith was built to be very light and acts primarily as a proxy between your own databases and APIs so we scale well with your own backends. The biggest limitation to building something consumer facing is that our UI and UX is geared towards making internal tools easy so our styling options are limited to simplistic UI. Authentication and access control come out of the box but if you have your own authentication APIs you can just as easily build a login page on appsmith and use them.

Looks amazing! Great work guys!

I guess you're the only open source alternative to Retool, for now. Also makes sense to make it open source since it will be a developer decision to choose which tool they'll allow database to connect to. Good luck!

Thank you! Yes, the idea is to be the most developer friendly low code product out there.

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