[longrod]

Not even close to AppSmith:

- Open source

- Self hosted

- VCS integration via git

- Lots of widgets

- Support for custom JS anywhere

- UI is okayish (for internal apps)

If this was open source & self host able then maybe but as it stands, there's no point. AppSmith has been the only low-code tool that allowed me to build exactly what I wanted thanks to their JS support. Budibase etc all lack that and fail miserably outside of a few standard cases.

[shaqbert]

I see collaboration software primarily in the context of work in a company. Self hosting OS is something I rarely see, as focus on your own product renders such endeavours a distraction. You substitute money for speed.

I like it when there is more competition. It forces Retool, Appsmith, etc to up their game and not become complacent. One of them may have a couple of extrea feature here or there right now, but 12-18 months from now the current tech lead will become a wash and the race is on.

The big price in this space probably is the great unbundling of enterprise software, i.e. taking a bite out of Oracle, SAP. I attended a top 100 customers event at SAP once, you'd be shocked at the amount of despreration (from massive global 500 companies) to get SAP to implemented the stuff they urgently need. Apparently it takes multiple years on average...

[DomPickerH]

Hi shaqbert! I agree with you. We believe in two fundamental trends. First, most software built for internal use are “low-complexity” use cases (dashboards, workflow management/automation,…) where low-code platforms are often a great choice. Second, the next generation of software needs to be built for true multiplayer use - making teams more productive, especially when not always co-located. Our ambition is to make building real-time collaborative tools fast and easy.

[mohanarpit]

Hey, lead maintainer of Appsmith here. Thank you so much for the kind words. :)

We are currently working on improving the UI so that you can build more modern-looking applications. Is there anything that you think we should improve/add to the product?

[longrod]

Love what you have done with AppSmith. I started with Budibase but their query language didn't allow for cross collection/db queries. Then I learned about AppSmith and it was absolutely phenomenal. I wasn't particularly impressed by the UI (Uify looks much more modern) but I wasn't building anything public. Here's my use-case:

- Managing users (user data is spread across multiple services/db so JS works very well here)

- SaaS analytics (total users, monthly users, subscriptions etc. For this AppSmith's charts "just worked" along with full support for MongoDB query language).

- Managing small internal tools (sending emails to users via GUI etc.)

I haven't tried some of the new stuff you guys have shipped yet (the new table, some light customization etc.). The whole reason behind choosing something like AppSmith was that I will only have to be concerned about data. No fuss about UI. No manual styling. No tinkering. For this AppSmith is perfect.

Along this line, I think what would be absolutely amazing is something like themes. They should be separate (think like editor themes). Theme designers can design how the widgets will look. Builders will focus on what they want to build. Instead of adding multitudes of controls and customizability in the widget view, this would be a better approach imo since I'd never be able to customize everything consistently which would result in a really broken UI.

Aside from that, AppSmith is great. Oh another thing that really frustrated me was the small inline editor for events/callbacks. It'd be super helpful to allow maximizing it somehow. Another thing in the same line is allowing importing modules. So for example, I can use AppSmith's minimal SDK to code my logic in TS using VSCode and then import that into AppSmith and it just works. It'd also allow using JS-only libraries from npm etc. This is definitely not as simple as it sounds but you get the idea.

[tut-urut-utut]

Thanks for mentioning AppSmith. Trying it out may be an impulse to finally tackle that internal tool that I have been procrastinating about for a while.

[DomPickerH]

Hey longrod! Dom, Co-founder at Uify here. Thanks a lot for your input - Appsmith is a solid product, and successful for good reason. While we share a base set of functionality for app building (visual editor, datasource integrations, “JS anywhere”), our vision is fundamentally different. The goal is not to enable the user to build a set of stand-alone internal tools, but rather to create flexible, collaborative workspaces for their teams. Our product is focused on collaboration across these apps (e.g. think: GSheet experience in tables), workflow automations and a modern approach to developer experience (TS instead of JS, testing framework built-in, more powerful IDE with usage tracking etc.). We will reach our milestone of launching publicly soon, and I hope you will give it a try and see for yourself :)