Appsmith raises $8M to take on the internal app market with open source code

I’m Arpit, a co-founder of Appsmith (https://www.appsmith.com) along with Abhishek and Nikhil. Appsmith is an open source project to build simple CRUD apps, custom admin panels, and complex internal tools. Some users call it a low-code product, but we think of it more like a framework. We launched our project 13 months ago and since then have seen 7.1K GitHub stars and 100+ contributors. Today we announced our seed and Series A funding.

I started building Appsmith in 2019 because I’m a backend developer and I was tired of dealing with React, HTML, CSS for CRUD applications. Frontend development has become incredibly complicated and this is my attempt to simplify it for at least this kind of software. While Appsmith is empowering if you are a backend developer because it gives you a skill that you don't necessarily want to learn, it’s incredibly useful for any dev looking to create webapps really quickly. You can create pages visually and write JS for any customizations or data transformations.

If I have to describe Appsmith apps, I’d say that we provide the view and controller layer in MVC, while you bring the model layer. This means that your data is never stored within Appsmith.

Appsmith ships with 35 react components, 14 datasource integrations (including an API connector, user roles, user authentication, Git sync, real-time collaboration, JS and more). You can self-host us for free or use our cloud edition.

Future open source roadmap includes: 1. More widgets and integrations 2. Custom theming 3. Ability to use any JS library 4. Add any custom react component 5. Integration with Lambda to enable non-UI workflows

You can use our open source edition or cloud hosted edition for free today. We’ll be introducing a pricing plan for our cloud hosted edition as well as an enterprise edition in 2022.

Future commercial and enterprise edition roadmap includes: 1. Integration into more SSO providers 2. Audit logs 3. Granular role based access control

Link to our GitHub repo: https://github.com/appsmithorg/appsmith

Happy to answer any questions!