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by rubenfiszel 894 days ago
(Founder of windmill.dev, the closest alternative to Airplane and we are OSS)

Congrats on the acquisition Airplane team. You were a strong inspiration for us, a precursor and set a high-quality bar for pro-code developer platforms. I have nothing but respect for the Airplane team and we probably wouldn't exist in our current form without your competition.

We are ready to migrate all Airplane customers and the migration would be very smooth as many of Airplane concepts map 1:1 to our own concepts. If you need urgent migration, ruben@windmill.dev

One customer, nocd, migrated hundreds of scheduled scripts and workflows in just a few weeks and with only minor changes.

Our platform being fully open-source, you will never be at the risk of us sunsetting anything since you can fully self-host it (it is not an hybrid deployment model like Airplane where the Control plane are in the cloud). We are used by thousands of businesses including a few F500 at scale and can send reference over emails.

We are a smaller team, have raised reasonably and are close to break-even. As an open-source product, I keep in mind to resist the urge of raising too aggressively so we can keep control of our destiny and never betray our open-source principles of transparency and fair pricing.

(note: we have an example repo of the folder layout one can use to be backed by git: https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill-sync-example, it's not all that different from airplane. See our CLI guide here: https://www.windmill.dev/docs/advanced/cli)

2 comments

We use windmill.dev since a couple of months now and are really happy. Development is very transparent as you can join their discord and give them feedback. We've had multiple moments where things were modified, adjusted or improved in <1h after we mentioned something. Seems like a great team. +1.
Your self hosted pricing seems difficult to understand. Why limit SSO users? Secondly, prices include per vcpu ? Is it like microsft style per CPU pricing ?
We limit SSO users in the pro versions vs enterprise because the pro version is only meant for small teams.

Prices include vCPU so that it is linear to your compute cost. Windmill is also used at scale for high-throughput and heavy jobs on enormous clusters but with very few users. We approximate that the compute part of the pricing will be approximately the same as your ec2 cost for your workers.

so if i host on my own server i still have to pay you per cpu?
If you want the enterprise edition, then yes
I'm confused. You claimed in your first comment that your platform is "fully open-source".

How is your enterprise edition "fully open source" if I have to pay to enable certain features when self-hosting?

i dont think their enterprise edition is open source. they only say open source on the first "free and open source" pricing table, presumably rest of enterprsise editions aren't
open source self hosted?