[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!