Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
Show HN: MUI Toolpad – Open-source, local-first, admin app builder (mui.com)
18 points by gprakhar 1056 days ago
Hi HN,

Prakhar, Jan, Pedro and Bharat here - we are excited to introduce our product to you. It’s been more than a year since we started working on Toolpad and we're glad to show it to the HN community today.

MUI Toolpad is an open-source, self-hosted internal tool builder designed for backend and full-stack developers who want to build web apps such as analytics dashboards, CRUD interfaces, and utility apps quickly. Toolpad comes as a Node.js package that integrates into your backend and harnesses the speed of its drag-and-drop UI builder for the frontend.

It comes with 16 pre-built Material UI components to build UIs in minutes. You can also import and use external React components in the drag-and-drop builder.

Toolpad runs completely locally which means you're not stuck with an online code editor or a suboptimal GitHub integration. It lets you use your own IDE and extend your existing functions to the canvas through intuitive queries. All configuration is stored in local files which you can version-control, edit, and deploy in any way you want.

You can check out a live demo here [1]. If you find it useful, you can support us by giving a star on GitHub [2]. We released our public beta [3] this week. We're happy to answer any questions/feedback in the comments.

[1]: https://stackblitz.com/fork/github/mui/mui-toolpad/tree/mast...

[2]: https://github.com/mui/mui-toolpad

[3]: https://mui.com/blog/2023-toolpad-beta-announcement/

1 comments

Very cool, but honestly Retool is very far ahead right now. Do you see Retool as a competing product?
Thanks for checking out Toolpad.

I agree that Retool and a few others are ahead in this category. Like them, we also have a drag-and-drop UI builder that makes them a competitor. But we see Toolpad as a more code-friendly alternative that can be directly imported into an existing codebase. Toolpad supports extending your existing backend functions to the canvas and ensures that a single source of business logic exists.

Retool, and others are SaaS tools that are good initially but can get pricey quickly as an org scales.