Show HN: ToolJet 2.0 – Open-source alternative to Power Apps and Retool | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: ToolJet 2.0 – Open-source alternative to Power Apps and Retool

github.com

210 pointsnavaneethpk49 comments

Somewhat funny bug, after running via docker and getting to the initial account creation webpage, the email field has a limit of 25 characters and won't accept my email.

I changed the character limit in the browser dev tools and it accepts the email and works just fine.

I think the limit for an email address is 254 characters, so maybe someone just forgot the '4'!

Side note: This is why backend validations are necessary. When the frontend validations are crappy, it does help if the backend doesn’t validate, but when the validations are good, they can usually easily be bypassed if the backend doesn’t validate (not to mention the potential security vulnerabilities that can exist because of this). But I digress . . .

Thanks for reporting, fixing this asap.

I have seen appsmith and tooljet in the space. Played around with them for a while. What I am super scared of is pricing. Though it is free and opensource. I love that, moment you ask me to pay. I am going to opt Retool as it is more enterprise ready from perception wise. Even superblocks that cloned and copied appsmith, I am willing to pay for them as there is trust of some sorts as they have certain upfront pricing. Not having upfront cost can. be very deceptive.

Do check out appsmith.com/pricing , we've tried to be upfront, happy to answer any questions you might have :)

https://windmill.dev also has upfront pricing

    I had recently been looking at ToolJet to build an internal app for my printing company-- essentially I'm looking for something to use as a filemaker type system.  I want to make job tickets for print jobs, essentially just searchable text with a thumbnail image preview (or two or three) representative of the contents of the job and then details on media and print settings.  All of this is fairly straightforward except for the image part.  Ideally I'd be able to drag and drop a thumbnail into the "file upload" widget and have it appear in the "image" widget, but this is where I'm getting stuck.  I realize it is possible to store image files in a SQL database, but I'm not sure if this is my best option.

    I'm very much a "no-code" or "low-code" target, as i'm not a programmer, but i know my way around a linux terminal, and I host some docker instances in which i've interacted with sql databases before.  But I feel like if a tool like this is going to catch on with anyone less competent than someone fluent in at least one programming language, I'm a pretty good test case for what that could look like--

    Honestly I wish there were a more traditional forum, I'm really not a fan of the current trend to have all discussion on a slack/discord channel where the information isn't threaded by topic, and is constantly at risk of being lost forever if the slack subscription stops being paid past 10,000 recent posts...

*edit: formatting

You don't want to indent your paragraphs here, as that converts it to a fixed width font (that's more for showing a short code snippet)

Just put a line break instead.

Hi HN,

Founder here, ToolJet’s story began when I launched beta version of ToolJet in June 2021 on HackerNews ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27421408](https://news....). It was very overwhelming to see the repository getting more than a thousand GitHub stars within less than 8 hours of launch. Since then we’ve grown into 16,000 stars and 300 contributors on GitHub. 1000s of teams are now using ToolJet to build and maintain their internal tools.

Today, we are excited to launch ToolJet 2.0.

We believe that any piece of software that has access to sensitive data of companies/people should be open-source and hosted on premises. Along with a strong focus on data privacy, we’ve also made sure that ToolJet as a platform is extremely flexible.

What is ToolJet?

ToolJet is an *open-source low-code framework* to build and deploy internal tools quickly. Those who already understands the low-code landscape, ToolJet is an open-source alternative to Microsoft Power Apps and Retool. ToolJet has integrations with data sources, such as databases (like PostgreSQL, MongoDB, MS SQL Server, SnowFlake, etc), API endpoints (with support for OAuth2 authorization), external services ( Airtable, Stripe, Slack, Google Sheets, Notion, etc) and even cloud storage services ( S3, GCS, Minio ).

What’s new?

- Redesigned every screen with a heavy focus on user experience. - Added in-built no-code database. This feature is built on top of PostgreSQL so that the self-hosted users can take advantage of capabilities of SQL as well. - Support for multi-page applications. - Realtime multiplayer editing so that changes from one user will not override the changes from another user. - Support for using Python ( along with already supported JavaScript ). You can use Python even for interacting with UI components. - Every installation of ToolJet can now have multiple workspaces. Each workspace can have their own SSO config and users. - ToolJet now has more than 50 data source integrations. You can also build custom connectors for ToolJet using our Plugin Development Kit ( [https://www.npmjs.com/package/@tooljet/cli](https://www.npmj... ). - We added a bunch of new UI components. Even complicated ones like Calendar and Kanban board. You can also import your own React components and use them within ToolJet apps. - ToolJet is now available in 8 languages including Spanish, Italian, German, French & Russian. - More test coverage using Cypress. We now have dedicated team members for improving test coverage.

We are still very early in our journey and there is a lot more to build. Constant feedback from the open-source community is the reason why we are here, any feedback is appreciated and happy to answer any questions.

Anyway you can enlighten me on how to distinguish between Users to build the apps and users that will use the apps? I got lost in the documentation. I'm assuming there are different kind of users. Users that build the apps and outside users that register to use the app, if publicly facing.

You can create user groups and give permissions to specific apps. Permissions are either "view" or "edit". If given "view" permission, the user will not be able to make changes to the application.

The free tier has no "user groups & roles". Practically what does that mean?

Sorry, looks like a mistake. What free tier misses is only the granular access control. Fixing it asap.

Congratulations on the 2.0 launch! This looks interesting. We’re considering something like this internally. Could you talk a bit about the differences - if any - between the self-hosted version and the hosted version, and what the plan is with respect to feature parity going forward?

The differences are listed out here: https://www.tooljet.com/pricing. Cloud deployment are usually a few days delayed, features are very similar.

One thing I find missing in every such platform (except Retool) is a user editable code library. It's one thing to be able run code in query transformation and widgets, another thing to be able to organise common code patterns into functions and use them in multiple query transforms and widgets. Once an app grows large enough, this becomes really important. Otherwise, there's always a build-up of copied and pasted code that's a nightmare to update (or even use) later.

The best I could find was just this: "ToolJet allows you to internally utilize the Moment, Lodash, and Axios libraries". But what if that's not enough? What if I need another library to use? I know, I can add it to a fork I self-host, but that's still not "user editable".

We are working on this actively. npm packages and Python packages from Micropip will be supported soon.

Organising queries: yes, this is also on our roadmap but yet to prioritise. Thanks for the detailed feedback.

Curious why AGPL was the optimal license choice? As a license, it will preclude a number of the same companies that would want to run it on-premise for data security reasons. (Some large companies that might have the same need to run on-prem or private cloud, also blanket won't approve GPL/AGPL licenses.)

We've written about this choice on our blog in detail: https://blog.tooljet.com/changing-license-to-agpl/.

Interesting.

Is it possible to run ToolJet on bare metal without too many problems?

And this might seem silly, but SQLite3 datasource integration could be pretty sweet :)

docker run \

  --name tooljet \

  --user root \

  --restart unless-stopped \

  -p 3000:3000 \

  -v tooljet_data:/var/lib/postgresql/13/main \

  tooljet/try:latest

Did you add support for SSH Tunnel for data source connections (e.g. mysql)?

Not yet, this is not in our immediate roadmap.

There should be a tier between free and enterprise, with granular access control like for small saas companies.

Right, we are exploring this as well but don't have a solid plan yet. Since the pricing is custom, we try to provide a plan that works for a specific customer.

Hi sorry for the stupid question I'm doing product marketing at a startup, not really a tech guy The furthest I've tried building my own tools is using Zapier and Segment

My question: If I'd like to start with tooljet and build tools that can sync and manipulate data across platform, what coding skills should I learn, or where can I start in general?

Further, I'd really like to explore more about what I can do with tooljet from a product marketing and analytics perspective.

Appreciate any advice thanks

Hey folks! Congrats on your 2.0 version. I spot you guys were on the top 3 of Product Hunt, that's great! We are building something new at ILLACloud as well. Repo link here: https://github.com/illacloud/illa-builder

Previous discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31263487 (May 2022, 12 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27421408 (June 2021, 68 comments)

How does it compare with AppSmith and Budibase?

Half a year ago I evaluated various low/no code tools and settled for Budibase in the process. I can't say much about ToolJet because I could not get the docker container to run on my MacBook Pro (M1) back then. I really liked the form editor and the inbuilt table control of AppSmith. But as I had to build something for a customer where various (external) users could access some data I chose Budbase, because it supports lots of users in a few different roles.

The inbuilt database was also something only Budibase offered back then. But that's something ToolJet also offers (nowadays?).

In built database is one of the features of this highlighted 2.0 release here.

I liked Budibase as well, and Tooljet seemed nascent but has improved now in this to be closer I guess. Need to play with it.

I'm also going to give it another try, if I find the time.

For a "real" Application I'm currently looking at Supabase for the backend and vue.js+Quasar for the Frontend.

Wow this is really impressive! It has improved so much. Best low-code tool out there right now.

My question is a bit of a non sequitur, but I noticed that your project took off pretty quickly out of the gate. Congrats!

I am curious what non-HN places have resulted in that level of interest in the project?

Reddit has given us a lot of users. Especially r/selfhosted.

How can ToolJet relicense AGPL contributions to a less restrictive license?

The code is AGPL and accepts volunteer contributions under that license.

https://github.com/ToolJet/ToolJet/blob/develop/CONTRIBUTING...

However, in their AGPL announcement it says:

> We do have a commercial license that overrides the AGPL license. This commercial license allows organizations to make changes to ToolJet and provide it as a service.

https://blog.tooljet.com/changing-license-to-agpl/#what-some...

Does the hosted ToolJet service include unreleased code, leveraging this commercial license?

Every volunteer contributor would need to agree to relicensing and/or would need to have previously agreed to assign their copyright to ToolJet, right?

Contributors have to agree to a contributor license agreement (CLA) when they create their first PR.

It's amazing to see the landscape of open-source internal tool maturing, this release of tooljet look great. There are also other tools like windmill.dev that support complex workflows and serverless endpoints, and budibase that focus on no-code administration panel. The future is open-source!

I've also been a happy user of Windmill.dev. I guess ToolJet has more of a low-code focus with their drag and drop builder, while Windmill is more focused on developers who want to turn their scripts into production workflows.

Very excited to see all these open-source projects take off in the internal tooling space. I regret how much time I spent building custom DIY tooling at previous jobs!

ToolJet should be added to https://sso.tax/.

https://github.com/robchahin/sso-wall-of-shame/issues

Should it? It doesn't have paid-but-no-SSO tiers. It only has "free" or "paid which includes SSO". So I don't think it's fair to say there's an SSO tax with this one. I don't think we get to expect SSO on free things.

I don't love mysterious "enterprise" pricing, but I don't know if there's a wall of shame for that :)

This is very cool! Added to my list of stuff to play with next time I have some cycles

I wanted to use ToolJet in my company, but SSO has been playing an important role for my company's security and compliance needs, even though we have only around 100 people. I'm getting lazy to adopt any product that doesn't provide that to me (for a reasonable price).

In the case of no/low-code tools, Budibase[1] offers SSO on its open source edition, which makes it easier for me to adopt it and gain confidence in the product before committing to an enterprise plan with obscure prices and shady sales techniques.

But it's a shame, since the competitors in this space are awesome (ToolJet, AppSmith, NocoDB, Baserow, etc) but rarely consider SSO as a simple and basic feature. They usually put SSO as an enterprise feature in the highest price tier possible.

Btw, Grist[2] is another honorable mention in this space with open source support for SSO.

[1]https://budibase.com/

[2]https://www.getgrist.com/

Hey! Rishabh from Appsmith here. Thanks for mentioning Appsmith!

Just to clarify, at Appsmith, we offer SSO (OIDC, SAML) in our paid plan (appsmith.com/pricing) - where you pay a maximum of $20/user/month (with many customers paying lesser than that as they add more users). Infact it's the only plan we have. Do check it out.

For forgot to mention, Google and Github SSO are part of the Appsmith community edition.

The other thing to also note is that we don't put a limit on the number of users that can be added to the paid plan. This doesn't apply to Tooljet coz it only has custom pricing, but with the other players you will notice that typically you get upgraded to either a higher tier plan or a higher minimum $ commitment, as you add more users, even if you don't want the features of those higher tiers.

Whenever I see mysterious Enterprise pricing and that's the only tier with SSO... I don't even both investigating the project because it creates significant hurdles to learn whether I even would be allowed to use it at work. If you want SSO to be part of an Enterprise pricing package, at least publish the Enterprise rate on the website.

Enterprise rates are usually negotiated individually with each customer and therefore not published. Enterprise sales are a different world.

https://windmill.dev has support for SSO (GitHub/Google/Microsoft/GitLab) and any custom ones in the open source version https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill#oauth-for-self-hos...

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