[afhammad]

I use Retool extensively at work for internal tooling (A.K.A Backoffice). It's really good in that I don't have to think about it much. There seems to be a new open-source competitor popping up every month, which is great, but I really wish people would get behind one or two of them and make them much stronger contenders.

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.

[rubenfiszel]

I'm an ex-palantir (left 3y ago, things might have changed) that worked on Foundry and building Windmill [1] which is an open-source framework that would actually be closer to Foundry except we do workflows and not data pipelines.

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.

[1]: https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill

[afhammad]

I've not used Foundry myself but I've been given a demo of it fully implemented at a company.

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.

[rubenfiszel]

It's an interesting discussion. I of course agree with the sentiment and am convinced of the need for an open-source "operating systems" for enterprise and that's where we draw our inspiration from. However there is a big risk of both bloat and doing everything but not very well.

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.

[afhammad]

agreed. I'm gonna checkout windmill when i get a chance, thanks!

[sevazhidkov]

It's very hard to understand what Foundry actually is from the provided landing page. Would you be able to describe it? Is it like Retool, but with more data sources and blocks? Can you actually drag-n-drop new applications in it or it's customized by Palantir only?

[afhammad]

@vladsanchez, @sevazhidkov, @Aeolun

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

[ebiester]

We're still in the exploration of ideas at this point. Eventually that will happen, but I think there's a lot of room to explore before converging on the best implementations.

[afhammad]

I hope you're right but from the outside it looks like everyone is just rebuilding the same thing.

[Aeolun]

Foundry is a terrible comparison, if only for the fact that I still have no clue what it does after reading that page (something with analytics?)

[kyleblarson]

I use it pretty extensively as well. It just works and is cheap. Can't imagine using an open source alternative.

[vladsanchez]

Foundry is no match to either of these tools, but it's not open source. Thanks for sharing!