[smt88]

I'm generally supportive of more tools like this, but we need to know what your hook is. How is this different from other no-code tools? What does it do uniquely well? What tradeoffs are you making that will appeal to certain users?

Also, you may run into some name conflict issues with:

- Airtable

- Airrange

- Airdev

- AirOps

[airforms]

> What does it do uniquely well?

Building forms on top of relational databases.

There are plenty of no-code tools out there, but not many that can build traditional forms for your own database + schema.

[smt88]

> not many that can build traditional forms for your own database + schema

That's not true in my experience. Retool has fantastic support for connecting directly to databases, including generating forms from schemas, no-code queries, and support for multiple RDBMS.

It looks like Budibase[1] also supports it.

My company has been looking for an admin system that we can build in dev and then deploy in our API repo so that any API deployment has an admin system deployed with it (that uses the same environment variables to connect to the database). This would help us a lot with our multi-tenant setup.

It seems like your product has some qualities that would help us because of the self-hosting, headless aspects. You might find a niche of people like me.

1. https://docs.budibase.com/docs/postgresql-1

[airforms]

There are big differences between the feature sets of Airforms and those apps. I would encourage you to take a closer look at our product!

[smt88]

I see two features that Airforms has that Retool doesn't:

1. Airforms can be self-hosted

2. Airforms creates a database diagram

Honestly I'm not sure #2 is useful. I've been working heavily with database for 20 years and have never found one to be useful. Laypeople might feel differently, and it doesn't hurt to have it, of course.

Beyond that, Retool has all the features that Airforms has and a lot more. Retool is genuinely amazing and a mature product. I've used it extensively.

That said, Retool is expensive and not great for non-coders. If non-coders can really use Airforms effectively, then that's a big differentiator. The price is too, of course.

[interlocutor]

Does Retool have a query builder? Does it support query parameters? If not how do you find the record you want to update? Does it support displaying fields from lookup tables (i.e., tables joined via foreign key)? How do you pick a record from a foreign table (when you want to update the foreign key itself)?

[smt88]

> Does Retool have a query builder?

Yes. It may not be exactly like the one in Airforms. You can do CRUD operations/mappings without writing any SQL, or you can drop into SQL (with autocomplete and a schema browser) if you need more complexity.

> Does it support query parameters?

Yes.

> Does it support displaying fields from lookup tables (i.e., tables joined via foreign key)?

Yes.

> How do you pick a record from a foreign table (when you want to update the foreign key itself)?

There are multiple ways to do it. The easiest way is to run a query to get the IDs (and labels) from the table you're joining and then add that to some kind of input (list, table, etc.)

Like I said in a previous comment, a lot of this stuff requires knowing how to code or at least some technical understanding of databases, which might be a differentiator.