Hacker News Reader

Comment by foxbee | Hacker News Reader

If you're interested in an open source alternative to Retool, checkout Budibase.

On top of a drag and drop visual builder, Budibase comes with an automation platform (like zapier) , internal db, and a lot more flexibility when it comes to design.

We launched our cloud product 7/8 months ago and we just hit the 40,000 companies using Budibase.

Budibase is open source and you can run it on Docker, K8s, Digital Ocean, Raspberry Pi, ARM, and more.

If you are interested, check it out:

https://github.com/Budibase/budibase

https://budibase.com

To David and the team at Retool - congrats! I'm the cofounder of Budibase and it's wonderful to see you push the industry forward. But we're coming to get you :-)

View on HN

I wanted to try budibase in order to evaluate and compare it without hosting it myself, is that something I can do for free on the cloud product?

Yes. You can build and deploy up to 4 apps for free with as many users as you need, for free.

So is there anything which Retool provides over Budibase?

Yes. I have not tried it in a while, but it's live eval when binding was better than Budibase, and it has some components Budibase does not (report generator, scanner, signature).

Retools UX is different from Budibase. Budibase separates the dev process into 3 stages; data, design, automate - where Retool is sort of like visual basic (everything in one). We used Visual Basic a lot in previous roles and we decided we could build something uniquely better.

One other thing Budibase has is a public API, which allows you to use Budibase as a backend (with different frontends including Next js, Svelte). It's also great for inter-operability.

With Retool, you must write JS to build an internal tool. With Budibase, writing code is optional. Our main goal with Budibase is to make it as accessible and flexible as possible. Open source is a great driver of this.

Once again, it's been a while since I touched Retool and it is a very solid platform and I am sure there are more things it provides over BB.

Budibase is tackling the same problem in a different way, from being open source and a different UX, to barrier to entry. We feel this is a better strategy in the long-run.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com