Show HN: Open-source alternative to Retool
github.com
github.com
Repo: https://github.com/refinedev/refine
It is headless by default and supports Material UI, AntDesign, Chakra UI, and Mantine.
It also has connectors for 15+ backend services including REST API, GraphQL, NestJs CRUD, Airtable, Strapi, Strapi v4, Strapi GraphQL, Supabase, Hasura, Nhost, Appwrite, Firebase..
You can compare with Retool and other similar tools https://refine.dev/docs/comparison/
In full transparency, I am the Head of DevRel at Appsmith, which is an alternative tool to Open Blocks, and a source for some of Open Block’s code (https://github.com/openblocks-dev/openblocks/search?q=appsmi...).
However, that is not really what I want to discuss here.
As long as I have been involved in open source, I have dealt with FUD about OSS from investors, executives, and business people who don’t “get it”. These folks have usually been highly resistant to open sourcing code or making contributions because they think it will hurt the business. “Why would I want to share code that can be used to compete against us?” This could even apply to a young engineer or maintainer of a growing open-source project who’s deciding to startup and thinking whether to build an OSS company.
We have seen a huge boom in open source business models, and this is a GREAT thing. But, what can we do to ensure that we don’t prove the naysayers right?
My concern is that as we see a rise in competition among open source businesses, we will also see a rise in competitive businesses (open source and proprietary) that use previous work to accelerate their advantage… which is one of the central features to open source.
But, in theory, open source also has advantages for those who provide code - attribution, contribution, funding, shared resources, etc. There are also different licensing models that have strengths and weaknesses. We decided to go with a permissive license so that people can use Appsmith in all environments, and sometimes this works against us because competitors can build on top of Appsmith. But hey, that’s the nature of the game right?
So - what can we or should we do as a community to ensure that open source business models can be successful without tarnishing the reputation of open source in general? Should we be more clear with attribution? Should we partner and make shared libraries for common functionality? Maybe do nothing? What do you think?
I'm also curious how you think this may apply to the rise in AI coding projects. In theory, it will become possible to create complex software by simply describing it well, and much of that code from the AI training is open source.
Then, it's difficult for me to have a good discussion with u on the AI coding project. There are so many problems, such as licenses, trademarks, and secrets of contribution behind AI coding.
Thk u.
My question here is more about IF or HOW we, as a community, should improve how we reuse or extend open source code for commercial projects. I am very open to hearing all ideas - thanks.
To provide some background info, there are 19 files containing code from Appsmith currently, all of them are about data source integration and have been added the corresponding apache license text.
I'm a super fan of open-source software. Nowadays no software can be built without the dependency on open-source projects. Openblocks have a direct dependency on dozens of open source projects, I'm grateful to all of them and I don't think using them harms the reputation of open source, instead, this is what makes OSS prosperous.
I was an Appsmith user and the project helped me a lot on building tools, I really appreciate that you maintain such a great project. But building web apps has a big scope, I don't think the story ends here. One of the things that makes Retool/Appsmith stand out is their developer-friendly nature, but there are also many limitations compared to developer-first frameworks like React/Vue. We start a new project because there are so many potentials and possibilities that need to be explored.
Speaking of shared libraries, I think it's a fantastic idea. It will be amazing if we can maintain a common data source/integration library together. There are so many platforms out there that need integration features. Though, finding the right abstraction for integration is a little tricky. We are working on an protocol and will provide all the integration source codes of Openblocks with a more permissive license. Hopefully, other platforms can benefit from it and be able to spend more time on innovation instead of repetitive work.
There are always so many ways to solve problems, and lots of approaches that are optimized for specific users, tech stacks, industries, etc. Personally, I find so much more value in the exploration of new ideas and different decisions (as you have done) than simply being a "clone" of another tool.
As we move more into this new space, the ability to share libraries and integration patterns could be super useful for us all. I'll be sure to highlight that internally!
If you don't want your stuff used by small orgs that can't afford to pay, that's a totally reasonable standpoint. At the same time, though, if it's good they probably will use it despite not having SSO, and so that decision makessecurity (something that, by and large, benefits everyone) into an opt-in luxury good. Speaking only for me, I'd be uncomfortable espousing that as a philosophy.
But as we have seen, companies are not doing enough to secure the sustainability of the open source software they rely on for their businesses, and I think a balance needs to be struck.
SSO isn't where to try to bleed that pig though, I think, to the point where for team-based systems it is probably more proper to disallow anything else (and maybe make them pay for guest access outside of their domain!).
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?
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.
I looked at Budibase but it doesn't offer self-referencing table relationships and the CSV import process doesn't seem to support updates as cleanly as Grist. And the interface seemed kind of sluggish to me.
An ideal alternative to Retool. We offer an intuitive drag drop interface with 150+ pre-built UI components and you can also connect with any database of your choice and build admin panels, dashboards, or any kind of web and mobile apps. The best part is you can choose what suits you the best between user-based pricing or usage based pricing.
For more details > https://www.dronahq.com/retool-alternative/
(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.
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.
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.
Edit: hmmm, it's pretty hard. I was trying to export a pretty simple app but it looks like there's a ton of features not supported here. (I guess it's pretty hard to build a full development environment with GUIs.) For example, I have a simple table in Retool where I'm doing inline editing. Unfortunately Openblock's table is read-only. So I guess I'll have to manually add a form. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to easily add validations to the form, and it seemed a bit buggy when submitting it too (maybe not properly debouncing?). Also, it looks like the permissioning system is much more rigid, and doesn't support, for example, showing different things in the app depending on the user group?
Looking forward to seeing it mature, but it does feel like there is a lot of surface area. I've tried a few other OSS builders, and I think Retool still comes out ahead when it comes to building actual production use cases. Like another comment said, I do wonder whether there will ever be a true OSS version? Seems like everything is "free for now, will charge for enterprise features later". At that point you might as well just use Retool, since the product is a lot better?
It’s great to see more options out there, though...
How do you plan to fund it?
I know how much effort it takes to build something like this. Good luck!!
Disappointing to see Firefox flagged as a "Not supported browser".
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.
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.
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.
Personally, I would rather have a warning that FF "may" have issues, than no warning at all. Nothing is stopping a user form using FF if they want, and now they have a heads up.
As a long time open source user and contributor, I find it disappointing when some people can become entitled and complain about free software that doesn't exactly meet their expectations.
As mentioned elsewhere, the fact that it is open source means that anyone can potentially contribute... so if it is a large issue, then there is nothing stopping folks from trying to solve the problem themselves.
/s if you didn realize
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill
(Or @rubenfiszel could edit their post)
Even for the simplest and my own sites, I usually typed it out in the browser and copy-paste. :-)
1. building
2. marketing
3. managing
A lot of internal tools would be externally viable as well (not all).
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.
One thing to note - proprietary does not necessarily mean it is any safer or more stable than OSS. Superblocks is actually a closed source fork of Appsmith, so the code is very close to the open source version, but now it is not visible.
In my experience, proprietary vs OSS is not the issue, but maturity and support.
Most newer software either has undiscovered bugs, or develops them as they grow and become complex. More mature software tends to be more stable in general, and OSS projects with commercial backing tend to have the resources (and incentive) to focus on security and stability.
This is why I am so interested in the explosion of Open Source business models. In theory, it provides a more stable product and commercial support, while still being transparent about its code and being open to community contributions.