Some feedback, as you asked for it and I signed up for both OpenBlocks and Budibase cloud versions today to try them out:
(NB: If I like either or both of them I’ll self host, as I have no interest in SaaS, indeed it’s what’s stopped me from using things like Retool despite missing RAD tools ever since Delphi stopped being a viable solution for me.)
OpenBlocks dropped me quickly into its pretty snappy app (literally just connected Github and done) and I was away and designing a simple screen in no time. Budibase on the other hand asked me a bunch of questions about my “company” and job, then dumped me straight into a wizard to create or connect to a database.
It felt like ages before I could start clicking and playing around. I nearly gave up and left at least twice and in fact ended up only trying the actual tools in Budibase out for a much shorter time as a result. Maybe I’ll go back to it later, but I’m already planning to deploy an OpenBlocks instance to mess around with more.
I massively prefer the OpenBlocks approach here. I want to be dropped quickly into a powerful and intuitive tool, not taken through a signup and data harvesting flow nor invited to create an app through a series of wizards. From what I see Budibase looks promising and it seems to have some features that OpenBlocks doesn’t (though the app also felt a bit less snappy than OpenBlocks and speed is really important), but the general experience as a new user was a bit much.
Thanks for the feedback. I really appreciate it. You don't have to go through that flow. You can just use the docs and run it using digital ocean, docker, linode, kubernetes...
But! We are updating our onboarding to be quicker. In re to app perf, it's a little surprising. It's an area we don't get much neg feedback on so I'm happy you reported it. I'll feed this back to the team.
Thanks for the response. I'll definitely give it a proper look and try out self hosting. It's actually quite nice that you have a "Budibase DB" option which might come in really handy compared with OpenBlocks.
And yeah, I realise I could just self host immediately but I wanted to use the cloud version to decide whether to make that effort and that was where the flow sort of got in the way (though I wonder now if there might have been an option to cancel it earlier or skip it that I missed…).
Re: the perf, I honestly don't think it is all that bad, but interactions just felt a bit less instant straight after using OpenBlocks. It might even just have been the animations in the UI giving that feeling :)
EDIT: actually, a couple of examples of the performance difference I have just noticed are:
1. The speed the selection outlines of the components follow the mouse hover in the designer.
2. The speed of updates of the designer when properties are changed, for example OpenBlocks both updates the text of a text element in real time and does it nearly instantly, whereas Budibase waits for pressing enter (which I think is fine) and has a noticeable delay. The delays seems to be there with all property edits. It feels like perhaps a server round trip vs optimistically updating the display locally, but is definitely noticeable.
(I work at Retool.) We offer a self-hosted version of Retool if you're interested: https://retool.com/self-hosted/ The self-hosted option is also free for teams of up to 5 people under our new free plan.
Budibase is my next option until they implement full drag and drop functionality. Also one thing that stopped me from using budibase now is: "pagination not working on tables which use queries or relationship data". Other tools can handle something similar.
(NB: If I like either or both of them I’ll self host, as I have no interest in SaaS, indeed it’s what’s stopped me from using things like Retool despite missing RAD tools ever since Delphi stopped being a viable solution for me.)
OpenBlocks dropped me quickly into its pretty snappy app (literally just connected Github and done) and I was away and designing a simple screen in no time. Budibase on the other hand asked me a bunch of questions about my “company” and job, then dumped me straight into a wizard to create or connect to a database.
It felt like ages before I could start clicking and playing around. I nearly gave up and left at least twice and in fact ended up only trying the actual tools in Budibase out for a much shorter time as a result. Maybe I’ll go back to it later, but I’m already planning to deploy an OpenBlocks instance to mess around with more.
I massively prefer the OpenBlocks approach here. I want to be dropped quickly into a powerful and intuitive tool, not taken through a signup and data harvesting flow nor invited to create an app through a series of wizards. From what I see Budibase looks promising and it seems to have some features that OpenBlocks doesn’t (though the app also felt a bit less snappy than OpenBlocks and speed is really important), but the general experience as a new user was a bit much.