Show HN: No-code alternative to Retool, Appsmith, Internal, etc. | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: No-code alternative to Retool, Appsmith, Internal, etc.

jetadmin.io

123 pointsantonsv90 comments

Hi, founders!

We’ve actually launched quite some time ago, but (semi)pivoted a few times along the way.

Jet Admin is an app builder for creating internal tools, admin panels, dashboards, external portals, and so on without coding. You can connect to any backend, assemble a UI through the visual builder, and set up data binding, transformations, conditionals, etc. through the point-and-click interface.

If you need to, you can create custom HTTP, SQL queries, make data transformations with JS, and embed custom UI components.

We believe that product, data, operations teams should be able to build the very tools they use. And with HN being mostly the coder community, it’d be particularly interesting to hear your feedback/thoughts!

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Hello - nice website! Draws you in well.

My standard questions as a coder for any tool like this are:

- how can I automate tests?

- how can I promote software up environments (using automation)?

- how can I use source control?

- how can I roll back a deployment?

Thanks!

I agree that once a project gets a bit more complex, these points are very important.

In our low code platform (https://github.com/dashjoin/platform), you end up writing several JSONata (https://jsonata.org/) snippets for ETL, actions, and visualizations.

These can be tested using junit. All changes to the app can be managed and deployed via GitHub. You can check out our sample app:

GitHub: https://github.com/dashjoin/dashjoin-demo Live: https://demo.my.dashjoin.com/

Thanks! As for source control, we already have project snapshots (that can be taken and restored manually) and environments merging. So you can do it manually right now, but Git integration with in-ui version control is in our roadmap already.

What do you mean by automate tests? What exactly do you want to test?

Thank you - great. A follow-up on Git - is it easy to understand diffs in pull requests? Can you follow what's changed the way you would with handwritten code?

On test automation I mean being able to write some fast tests that - say - test calculations and things like that, and medium speed tests that mock out the backend and play through the UI really fast, and slower end to end tests that play through the UI with a backend connected. And being able to do all that on Git commit push via CI is really helpful.

> What do you mean by automate tests? What exactly do you want to test?

One of our customers in the public sector builds a Low Code app that performs automated plausibility checks on forms submitted by clients. These checks can be quite complex since they reflect legislation. In this case it is crucial that you can mock form input and validate the checks against expected results.

My biggest bugbear with these tools is poor git support. If someone dragged and dropped their way through the UI, I want to be able to reliably commit that to a branch and recover to it using standard git workflows.

Most don't do this, or do it in such a brain-dead way that I am forced to use a branching model that is all wrong (eg a branch for each environment)

Yeah, at my company we spent a ton of R&D time adding first class git support in conjunction with drag and drop UI, WITHOUT introducing a DSL. Non-trivial problem but it can be done.

How do you avoid a DSL in that case? Is it the problem class allows you to represent the UI state as regular code?

Since you mentioned about git, I wanted to point out that Appsmith supports git sync. You can follow a standard git workflow. https://docs.appsmith.com/core-concepts/git-sync

I'm a co-founder of the project, so forgive my shameless plug.

retool does support github integration

We already have project snapshots (that can be taken and restored manually) and environments merging. Git integration is in our roadmap already.

Hello, could you consider allowing SSO on all plans ?

See https://sso.tax

We're trying to match feature sets within plans with the company profiles and the stages. It's true we've received quite a few requests to enable SSO in Pro plan, but may you share your use-case or potential use-cases where you need SSO in an early-stage startup?

It's just a security measure. As a founder of a currently 4-person company, I want SSO everywhere I possibly can. It reduces attack vectors, and makes it so much easier to ensure nobody has access when they leave the company. Every product we use that doesn't offer SSO has to be added to our onboarding/offboarding checklists.

It comes down to this: Don't assume companies are incompetent at proper dealings around employee access to products they use just because they're small. These things tend to be correlated, but it hurts small companies trying to deal with this correctly.

Edit - Let me phrase it like this: By locking away account management and security tools you're implicitly stating only large enterprises should care about security.

Don't expect this to change. Most companies realize they can't provide any value for enterprises in that price tier, so they lock SSO behind the most expensive tier. Drives me mad but that's the industry.

Yes, and I find it absolutely ridiculous.

But I have found a couple companies that do a sort of "middle-ground" – SSO via SAML2 locked behind some "call us" enterprise BS, but Google Auth available to all.

MailGun does this, and so does Linear. Atlassian charges extra for SSO (via Atlassian Access) but it's just $30 a month or something, so seems totally reasonable even if extra.

This feels like a decent middle ground for smaller companies since it requires zero extra config.

We have Google Auth available in all plans as well btw

> use-case or potential use-cases where you need SSO in an early-stage startup

In general, keeping track of >1 passwords means giving everyone a password manager and also means you can't integrate with the rest of your endpoint security stuff (like if you use Azure AD, it can check if you are coming from a corporate-owned device and give you different privileges or let you bypass 2FA). There are more creative ways to get people to move to a higher tier rather than locking a essential feature up there. As it is, I can pay for your highest plan or just use PowerApps/Google's equivalent.

> use-case or potential use-cases where you need SSO in an early-stage startup

Every company, regardless of size, needs to be secure.

I hadn't seen sso.tax before, thank you thank you thank you, it is so true!

Glad to see Github there, it is so egregious in its treatment of SSO. First, I would gladly pay additional for SSO integration in Github. But a 425% increase!! It's absurd and insane, and given how there are limitations in other security features I can require (I can't, for example, require hardware token authentication, only generic 2FA), this is borderline criminal.

Pay for additional, enterprise-specific features, I totally understand. But as this site you posted so eloquently describes, when the option is "have shittier security" unless you pay an obscene, bundled markup. This is an area where I do think regulation should be required, not so much at features or pricing but that additional security features shouldn't be permitted to be bundled in, or that SaaS product should have some amount of liability when they don't provide unbundled, table-stakes security features.

I don't understand what the product is from the webpage nor from the video - so does the website stay online and hosted on your server? Can I download it and run it myself on premise via docker or something?

What background are you coming from? I'd love to understand what's not clear as we don't hear this kind of feedback often

I have some questions. I come from an enterprise background. We have similar home grown tools, but you'd also be up against large platform vendors (SNOW, SFDC, Power Platform, etc).

I guess Im wondering where large businesses fit in your target market. Not scrutiny, but I have personal interest in building tools for the enterprise space and wonder how startups approach that market. e.g.,

  - Is this SaaS? Could this ever be self-hosted? **Edit - I see you've answered below & that you currently support self-hosted
  - Do you intend to support enterprise identity/graph integrations (O365, Google, etc).

I am a enterprise consultant, my clients will laugh in my face if I tell them we have to use some other company's server via internet. :-) The reason I asked is because we use metabase, and it was simple to host it because we just pulled the docker files and ran them. (https://www.metabase.com/docs/latest/operations-guide/runnin...)

I dont see any such instructions on your website so that why i asked. Thanks for your time by the way, your product looks very good.

We do have two options: - hybrid: you can install our open source jet bridge application on your side if you don't want data to run through our server at all, but frontend and project UI settings will be hosted on our side - on premise: we already have option to host all components on your side, but this is available only in Enteprise plans, please let me know if you are interested in it.

It would be nice to define what counts as a payed user. Everyone, who is using the sdk+tools or everyone who is using the apps built with the tools?

Same question for customer apps. Does the pay plan scale with the #admin users (AKA the dev team building the apps) or with the #customers?

Atm we count everyone who has access to an app as a user. Internal and external users scale separately within their pricing buckets.

The "request an integration" button doesn't work on mobile (chrome or firefox).

I wanted to request a Database connection through SSH since our databases are all behind a firewall and we access them through SSH tunnels.

Do you have any adblocker? This button should open up Intercom through google tag manager.

Btw, SSH for databases is in our road map already

Nope, there are no adblockers on chrome mobile that I'm aware of. I'm on a Samsung Galaxy S10+.

Good to hear about SSH being on your roadmap!

A nitpick: it might be helpful to have some more specific information on integrations - currently the description of each integration is more or less the same thing with the name of the integration replaced... from a user perspective, if they are all effectively the same description wise (as it currently appears), you could move that description somewhere where it wont be repeated and just show the individual integrations

A nitpick but a valid point nevertheless, thanks!

I'm a heavy user of retool. It has saved me a lot of dev time/money when creating internal tools for ops and marketing teams. I see you have put some effort into making nice UI for creating external apps - def one for me to explore. There are two things I noticed on your page that I like already - support for more than 2 environments and SQLite support.

Thanks, mate!

This is the first of these kinds of products that supports customer portal as a use case. In my opinion, this a HUGE differentiator from the rest of the retool/appsmith type tools and surprised no one has mentioned it yet.

I use retool as a client-facing frontend for a niche data ETL product and I’m getting killed on their enterprise pricing.

What is different from Retool ?

Or Appsmith for that matter, since I have a bit of experience with it?

Seems jetadmin is not open source while appsmith is.

That's correct

You can build not-so-complex user-cases faster and you can allow your non-tech team members to build and maintain internal tools (which eradicates the bottleneck between tech teams and business teams)

What are you advantages over Bubble, Appsheet, Retool, Appsmith etc?

Those are all different, so it's hard to explain in one sentence. Broadly speaking, Bubble is not that great for internal tools as you have to use add-ons for UI components and integrations. Appsheet is not suited well for complex multi-page workflows and is limited in integrations wheres in Jet you can consolidate data from lots of resources in one app + it's easier to set relations, drill-downs and pass and transform values to create complex interactive apps. Compared to Retool and Appsmith, we're faster to build standard use-cases and those can be build without coding.

One thing I am always curious about the headline pitches of most of these tools is — they say that they are for building INTERNAL tools.

Are these not suitable for building an external SaaS web-app? What exactly is the limitation that makes them not suitable for a world accessible SaaS app?

not being able to customize every little thing about branding and UX, not needing to have the same security/privacy standards, not having to work on mobile or on old browsers, etc etc. and thats just on the user side.

on the builder side, you can expose more confidential/internal data since you can safely assume the person and intended audience are only employees.

you can move faster if you assume away requirements that dont really matter in contexg.

does retool even have hyperlinks and routing yet?

Yes, it has a link component that allows routing to other Retool apps or external pages.

I would say from business perspective it is really bad idea.

You become reseller of the "low code tool" and now what are you providing to your customers that they could not do themselves?

There is also problem that anything goes wrong and you are not able to properly support your customers. With SaaS you have the code you have the team, you built the tool that you support and features are providing value.

I don't think you can do "multi tenancy" on "low code" platforms you would have to make separate account per customer. Which means you only repeat the work as you probably won't be able to build once and provide stuff for multiple companies.

GDPR where you are not side in processing might be nice as you ditch responisbility - but then your customers need to know who has their data. If they know what is stopping them from simply using "low code" on their own.

>What exactly is the limitation that makes them not suitable for a world accessible SaaS app?

Mostly that they can't figure out how to price it. The tools typically charge a lot per user ($20+/month/user). If you make external users cheap, then customers will just enter internal users as external users.

Didn’t think about this. I was thinking there might be performance/latency limitations. But “internal” tools may be good enough for early MVP prototypes for a SaaS app.

Who's your target persona?

That's a great question. I'd say we have to buckets that stay on quite the opposite sides of the ARPU-CAC spectrum: the SMBs+, which are typically operationally-heavy(daily usage patters) and the early-stage startups/entrepreneurs who want to protoype or are tired of manually querying a DB and want something more flexible and user-friendly

Can anyone suggest a tool that is similar to Retool / AppSmith / JetAdmin

BUT for programmers? I.e. I don't care about "no code" (happy to code myself, in fact I think it's best to be able to customize things in code) but that takes care of things like backend-frontend sync (ideally push-based), permissions, etc. is fast (looking at you, AppSmith) and ideally also automates some tasks (e.g. auto-generating the GUI from SQL schema, similar to the original Django Admin)?

Just my wishlist...

Edit: another way of describing what I want: I would like to be able to edit the SQL database (or whatever data backend) via an interface that can be Excel-like (just a list of rows), custom (just a GUI of custom components) or a mix (e.g. rows with search, or grouped by some key, or multi-editing several rows, or displaying foreign key relationships ("parent" row and "child" rows)).

What I am building is along those lines. It's more geared towards dashboards, and button-based interactions. But technically, you can code whatever. Right now it's a desktop app, cause then you don't have to deploy a server and screw around with CORS, and all that. All the people that use it so far use for internal apps, so they're fine with that.

https://www.jigdev.com

Let me know if that could be of interest, and if yes, what the tool is missing.

I think what you are looking for is retool plus a nice SQL client. Its really flexible and takes away a lot of pain from the front end. I wish it had an integrated DB editor.

This is retool, retool sometimes gets marketed as 'nocode' but really benefits from past developer experience, I think you could build exactly what you want using it.

Thought the same, if you love coding, Retools seems like a resonable solution for that. There are a handful of GUIs on teh market, but those are typically data source-specific.

You should check Motor Admin open-source tool (I'm the creator of the tool): https://github.com/motor-admin/motor-admin

>Auto-generating the GUI from SQL schema, similar to the original Django Admin

Thats exactly how Motor Admin works :)

I am building a tool that might satisfy some of your wants (the alpha is not completely ready yet).

It is code based, but everything else is taken care of including the UI which is auto-generated from your script parameters/signature in Python.

https://windmill.dev

Let me know what you think :)

Is it inspired by airplane.dev?

We have a lot in common indeed at this stage but there is a lot of incoming features that would differentiate us. They have a great team and their execution is excellent. I had the itch to start such tool for a long time and seeing that the ecosystem was growing, including airplane.dev inspired me to start my own.

Hi, just FYI, the `www.` version of your domain isn't working. I tried to replace the `docs.` subdomain from the URL and got an error.

Not sure if it's what you really want to see but there's a new solution called Serverless Cloud that lets you write only code in JS/TS. This platform handles the infra management itself. It has frontend sync, global CDN, secret management, event-driven design possibilities. https://www.serverless.com/cloud/

What you seem to be looking for exists and it’s called Directus: https://directus.io/ (authentification, permissions, GQL/REST API, admin interface, etc.)

But I would not call Directus a NoCode platform, it’s just a turn-key backend on top of a SQL database (also providing an admin interface).

I am myself a very satisfied user (for the last two months or so; Directus existed for a few years).

Have a look.

I've been spending the last few days looking into solutions in this space for the umpteenth time and Directus does seem to be one of the most interesting ones. It's basically a non-intrusive, flexible and extensible GUI on top of your DB, plus a REST API generated from it. Another big plus is it's open source.

It actually exists since 2004, so it would be fair to say it's been more than a few years. But they recently switched from PHP to Node.

Other solutions (with varying degrees of similarity) include Strapi, PostgREST, Hasura...

I've built Zero.sh - It allows you to code your own backend live in the browser, while we do the heavy lifting for the annoying parts (frontend, caching, authentication, etc.) - Try the playground at https://zero.sh/play (you don't need to login). Also do try to change the component on the top right of the playground.

you should check out Budibase, its got all the good parts of no code (nothing you said indicates you really want to be futzing around with css to get basic stuff up) but lets you code the important parts yourself and is open source so you can mod things if you need to

https://budibase.com

There’s a lot of other suggestions, but I’ll recommend my own: https://airplane.dev/

You can quickly turn scripts, SQL, REST endpoints, etc into lightweight internal apps with UI, permissions, approval flows, audit logs, and more. It’s like AWS Lambda but geared towards human-executable tasks.

Similar to what you’re looking for, all the UI etc is autogenerated. It’s not a drag-and-drop / WYSIWYG app builder.

Send me a note at ravi@airplane.dev if you’d like to chat about it.

Not OP but glad you mentioned this. We're starting to look at internal tooling libraries and this looks really interesting.

https://dbeaver.io

Love dbeaver. The cloud version is cloudbeaver.io

I use retool a lot, you can "hack it" with js code in the frontend, eventhough i load a lot of the code on my backend apis.

If you know python (Which I am assuming you do because you mentioned Django) https://anvil.works/ is probably a really good solution for you. They also just updated their pricing, and they are open sourced.

They have a GUI editor and their custom server runs a full python backend. One of the co-founder's has given a lot of talks about designing their system and I think it's pretty interesting.

I working on something like this.

https://widgetterminal.carrd.co/

My contact info is in my HN profile. Reach out if you want a demo.

Hi there,

throwing my hat into the ring. :) We're developing a language-independent "low-code" environment that's very much made for coders. Website is www.five.co

To give a few examples: 1. For your database, you can either import an SQL dump, or you can create the tables, relationships, etc. in point-and-click. We're using MySQL by default, but are database-agnostic. 2. You can write queries in SQL and use the result of these queries for things like charts, tables or dashboards. 3. You can write JavaScript, TypeScript and C# to create functions or processes used by your app. In the future, any language that can be compiled to WebAssembly can be used inside Five. We use Google's V8 engine for this. We also support libraries and plug-ins. 4. The GUI is provided by Five. All you've got to do is give it a theme in CSS or point-and-click. The GUI is responsive. We use Material UI. 5. Each app comes with three environments (dev, staging, production). All apps are containerized. We're using K8.

Our idea is to give developers a tool that let's them code as much as they want to, but provide "no-code" options for the more tedious tasks of development.

We don't have a trial on our website yet, but feel free to contact me and I can give you access to a training account.

Looking at the landscape of lowcode/nocode platform popping up recently, I can't help to notice that these platforms have started becoming very commoditized. Premise of all the tools is that, building UI is hard and you should use the tool. But if 100s of companies are doing the same, then I'll question the premise. Also, why would you build these solution yourself and not buy a point solution. For eg. CRM, why would you build your own crm when you can just buy a saas that does it for you. It is not that I'm against tools like this. Just some thoughts as I'm venturing into this space. Would love to hear some arguments.

> Also, why would you build these solution yourself and not buy a point solution. For eg. CRM

I suppose because you can build a CRM, a time tracker, analytics boards, and an admin dashboards for another service with one and the same tool.

Whether it is a good idea to do so, I don’t know.

Data and Integrations. Applications are mostly a way to produce and transform data. When you buy a lot of applications all trying to keep data locked in their systems, you cannot easily build BI, ML, AI or simply Automation models because data is all over the place. On the other hand, these low code tools don't make data easier because they don't enforce proper API designs, the SQL on top of React components is fun for a while but not everything is UI.

Said that, I always prefer to buy or use open source solution when there is one, as long as they have a good API and an easy way to get data out of them.

Most companies demand an enormous amount of customisation from their ERP and CRM systems and will not change their processes to match the system. Many popular SaaS like Salesforce are more like platforms for building a solution.

You are right about the fact that there is already a specific SaaS business for every use case that can be standardized.

However, what our customers build on Chartmat (also a no code tool) are custom solution: e.g. a therapist who has her own approach & wants to have an app for that approach that serves around 100 people. She could not use a custom SaaS because that would be following the approach of another "guru" in the industry. So there would not be a personal connection between her & her customers. Also for around 100 customers she would not want to hire a web dev agency to build a professional app. So that is kind of one of the use cases where a no code tool makes sense.

Another scenario is the following: let's say you are a small business (<5 employees) & you need a SaaS for time recording, billing, recording expenses, accounting, collecting customer information -> things that many small businesses like law firms need. Now you could have either 5-6 SaaS solutions for this or you could use one no code tool & process everything through one tool kind of like an ERP for small businesses and solo entrepreneurs. So you would end up paying 29$/month instead of 5 x 20$. Additionally you could easily consolidate all the data that matters in one single dashboard.

Very fair argument. My counter would be that the use cases that you are describing are very apt for a low code tool, but it also sounds like the market for that very niche and small (I might be completely wrong). You are talking about small businesses with 10 or less employees. Cost of acquiring them would keep growing as it looks like the market is getting commoditized, barrier is getting lower and crowded. My argument is very simple, if I am a small business my first intuition would be to find a platform with white-label community management for my customers and not build an app. Similarly, If I am small business I would look for a product for law firm or client management platform not think about building my own platform. I am saying this because if I am small business, I would not have time to build my own platform.

what you say makes sense. we have been struggling with finding a customer acquisition channel that is scalable. However, there are situations in which customers prefer to implement custom solutions & not use a SaaS. In that sense no code is more a competition to web development agencies than to a SaaS business. In order to acquire a new customer you need to find someone who wants to build an app now & needs a custom solution

A fair amount of the use of these tools isn't as complex as a CRM, rather, just a better version of spreadsheets passed around via email or shared drives. But better, as they provide some amount of data validation, more granular roles, notifications, workflow, etc.

I didn't get past the pricing page to be honest. Podio costs $20/seat for premium, your product costs $48 for pro (with enterprise price not even listed)

Podio is designed for different use-cases than Jet Admin. What have you built in Podio?

Far too expensive IMO.

The thing I love about dev/ops tools, is that they replace no code crap with code that can go into source control.

The whole No code movement is backwards.

That was uncalled for and unneceserally rude. If you have constructive criticism, you're still welcome

A bit of off topic but I created a small tool which converts simple text to database script, It reduces development time to create database tables and foreign key relationships.

https://text2db.com/

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