Comment by xyzzyrz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xyzzyrz | Hacker News Reader

Excited to see this posted here! I think probably because we announced it going open source today.

I think the GitHub page is probably a bit clearer than our website right now:

https://github.com/plasmicapp/plasmic

Basically, it's a visual page builder that plugs into your own Next.js/Remix/React/etc. codebase. Your marketing/content/design team can then build and publish pages without filing tickets on eng. This (content management) is the main use case.

The most interesting aspect is that editors can drag and drop React components from your own codebase as building blocks. This is very powerful, esp. with e.g. data fetching React components.

Why open source? Because we love the tool. Plasmic has been in production deployment at companies big and small. But we think it can grow far beyond ourselves as an open source project. We’d love to see a broader community take it in unexplored directions. Community users have even started using it to build emails with React.Email and mobile screens in React Native.

Would love to hear folks' questions and feedback!

I think another thing interesting about Plasmic is that it is a bit ambitious in trying to combine some seemingly disparate genres:

- Webflow, Wordpress and other page builders

- Retool and other tool builders

- Glide and no-code app builders

- Contentful and other CMSes

Today these are different tools to specialize in, but the line between, say, a website and an application is blurry (consider an ecommerce storefront with user logins, or a customer portal). With the right foundations, we think these can be unified—Plasmic’s UI can adapt to different levels of control for different personas/tasks.

So a newer use case is that you can use it to build applications as well as websites, for both developers and non-developers. This is the more experimental side of the project, beyond the content management use case.

Eh, their page doesn’t even load. Feh!

How does it stack up against MUI's Toolpad? (https://mui.com/toolpad/)

All things considered, they seem pretty similar - visual UI to generate React code that works alongside existing codebase, open-source & self-hostable, etc.

Replied to similar comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38701366

There's a vibrant industry of similar tools - but lots of differences and room to innovate!

Just a few of the differences: Plasmic....

- Is not specific to MUI

- Supports actual design control (beyond theming)

- Supports defining reusable components in the editor, with slots/props/variants

- Is suitable for websites and applications where page speed matters (static/SSR pre-rendering and data fetching, image optimization, etc.)

- Has a more structured layout system

- Is highly configurable UI for different personas - e.g. non-developers on the team

- Has cross-project imports / reusable libraries

- Has Figma import

- More...

Congrats on going open source! Which components are open sourced specifically? Is there any chance it will be self-hosteable? I don't want to host it myself any time soon but I prefer giving my money to a company where that's an option.

We still have work to do to make self hosting (much) easier, but yes, that's the plan!

Awesome, that is great news!

I am so delighted to see this go open source!!

So it's like a more advanced alternative to something like GrapesJS that also includes integration with some popular web frameworks?

You can think of it like that - GrapesJS ultimately outputs HTML that exists in its own universe, whereas Plasmic focuses more on integrating with existing codebases, where you might want to use your React components, render in your React context, etc.

This is awesome. Would love to learn more and build content at n0c0de.com using this. Please kindly fix the slack link.

Fixed, thanks!

Looks really cool and ambitious!

Curious why you guys decided to go open-source, and whether that was always the plan.

I talk about the "why" a bit above, but we've talked about how to open source it internally since almost its inception, but there's work involved in open sourcing that we just had to prioritize like any other work item, as well as concerns around whether we were ready to support it (for instance, in light of rapidly changing code and data).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com