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Looks like a competitor to Retool, interesting. The focus on data permissions, mobile support, and push notifications is really interesting because none of thos

Looks like a competitor to Retool, interesting. The focus on data permissions, mobile support, and push notifications is really interesting because none of those features are ones that Retool focuses on, I believe - those features being front and center makes me think Amazon has looked at the competition and wants to focus on what they offer that others don't, rather than just trying to be yet-another-tool in the space. On the other hand, I absolutely loathe every single UI that has ever come out of AWS, and there is absolutely no chance I give the editor they've built here a shot without hearing lots of positive reactions first. edit: actually going to pull back slightly on this comparison, since apparently Honeycomb is a little closer to something like Access, where there is a database _in_ the app, whereas Retool is built around connecting to an external data source (e.g. a SQL database). This surprised me because I assumed the entire reason you'd want an AWS version of this kind of tool is to integrate with the broader AWS ecosystem, like frictionless hookup to a DynamoDB or whatever. It may have this but just not spotlight it on the marketing pages?

brd529 6y ago
My first glance reads it to be more like airtable or even salesforce at some level, which to your point are the modern iterations of access / filemaker. Drag and drop all-in-one database and application designer that by virtue of being online and multi-user make them way more useful.
- darepublic 6y ago
  Yes my first thought was that this was like Airtable. One of these days one of these no-code solutions is going to actually stick, and I will stop getting paid to basically glue data from different systems together while browsing HN.
- basch 6y ago
  It's a fairly busy territory as it is, with at least 20 major enterprise players. Microsoft PowerApps with PowerAutomate (formerly Flow, their Zapier/IFTTT) have a huge advantage of being bundled right into other licenses. SalesForce and ServiceNow have similar advantages. Quick Base[1] has to be considered the incumbent. Zoho, Oracle. And then the more independent Appian, Betty Blocks, Mendix, OutSystems. This tends to be one space where consolidation and acquisitions aren't as popular, and the big players have built their own home grown products on top of their stacks. (counterpoint, Kony got snatched up by a fintech software services company, Temenos. Apple acquired Workflow which isnt quite the same thing but a tangent space.) In a lot of cases, its going to make way more sense to go with the Vendor that already provides other parts of your infrastructure. If you're an Oracle company, Oracle Apex is going to be simpler, which is the point of all these offerings. It makes a ton of sense for AWS to provide this naively on top of their already mature offerings. It's also not a space I'd want to enter as an independent startup, from scratch, unless you are sure you can actually offer something better and different. Or, instead of a generic offering, your product is tailored to the specific processes and workflows of certain industries. At this point if you want to join this crowd, it would be a safer bet to hitch your ride to a specific tech company lacking this offering (if there is one left) and become so good that they want to acquire you. Or build a specific subfeature in this space, so one of them gobble you up and tack you onto their product (see 3rd link.) I would guess there is still room for some ERPs to be interested in tacking app builders on, like Infor. https://www.gartner.com/en/documents/3956079/magic-quadrant-for-enterprise-low-code-application-platf https://www.gartner.com/en/documents/3956079/magic-quadrant-... https://imgur.com/kD5hQ46 https://imgur.com/kD5hQ46 https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/microsoft-acquires-softomotive-to-expand-low-code-robotic-process-automation-capabilities-in-microsoft-power-automate/ https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/microsoft-acquires-sof... [1] Somewhat shocked to not see Quick Base mentioned even once in this thread. It's a billion dollar company thats been offering this nonstop for 20 years, and is still relevant.
  - wharfjumper 6y ago
    I agree. In our case we're focusing on gathering and sharing information securely (end-to-end encrypted) i.e. Typeform for PII[0] with information verification built-in. There are lots of use-cases for a tool that enables non-coders to incorporate that information collection into their business process (we believe). [0] Personally identifying information
tyhoff 6y ago
I find it most similar to bubble.io, which includes databases but also allows linking to external data sources like Airtable.
dvdhsu 6y ago
Hi there! Founder of Retool (https://retool.com https://retool.com) here (and long-time HN reader). Agreed that Honeycode is adjacent to us. I think an interesting way of viewing the space [1] is who the product is for. There are lots of drag and drop app-builders (e.g. mendix, outsystems, bubble, msft powerapps, amazon honeycode, etc.), but they're all built for non-technical people. Their goal is to make programming more accessible to all. (Which I think is a very noble and very interesting goal!) Our bet, however, is that code is here to stay, since code is actually a pretty efficient way of getting a computer to do something [2]. With that said, though, building specific types of apps (in our case, internal front-end apps today) is surprisingly difficult (have you tried recently!? you have to use react, redux, install 10+ npm modules, etc... just to make a front-end that has a table + POSTs back to your internal API!). And so that's why we're building Retool for engineers, which has resulted in a few interesting decisions: * we are not a system of record, since engineers don't like to move data around. We'll connect to your data, no matter where it is (e.g. postgres, a custom API, salesforce, etc.). * we rely on the user knowing how to write code. I think this is interesting because low-code is good for getting to 50%, 60%, etc. But as you try to get closer and closer to 100%, it becomes harder and harder, since full customizability within a GUI (without code) is just hard (cf 2.). Retool lets you get to 60 - 70% of what you want very quickly, but then relies on you finishing the last ~30% with code, if you really want to. (We provide APIs, let you import custom React components, let you write JS anywhere [3] within {{ }}. this also has led us to embracing git syncing (serializing retool apps as yaml files and syncing them to git repos: https://docs.retool.com/docs/git-syncing https://docs.retool.com/docs/git-syncing ), being on-prem by default (https://docs.retool.com/docs/setup-instructions https://docs.retool.com/docs/setup-instructions), etc. (If anybody is interested in working on this, please email me at david AT retool DOT com. I think there's really a small chance we can really change how business apps are built.) 1. Funnily enough, when we started Retool, there was no low-code / no-code space. If you look at our original Show HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17725966 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17725966), you'll see that nobody mentions "no code", "low code", or anything siilar. It's certainly been fun to watch a "trend" pick up around us, haha. 2. For example, imagine a switch statement. Very simple and concise in most languages, but incredibly hard to implement in a GUI. (A graph with nodes and edges, perhaps?) 3. We secure it by running all JS in a sandboxed iframe.
txcwpalpha 6y ago
>On the other hand, I absolutely loathe every single UI that has ever come out of AWS, and there is absolutely no chance I give the editor they've built here a shot without hearing lots of positive reactions first. I agree so much with this. I hate the AWS console UI so, so much and It blows my mind that such a large company can't seem to even get on the same page about what color scheme or menu bar position they want to use. But actually, I'm messing around with Honeycode right now and although I haven't gotten a chance to really dig deep and test the long-term usability of it, I have to say that so far it is gorgeous and intuitive. If the UI team that worked on this just completely took over the AWS console, I wouldn't complain.
- outworlder 6y ago
  > It blows my mind that such a large company can't seem to even get on the same page about what color scheme or menu bar position they want to use. Isn't it the other way around? Being a large company makes coordinating on an uniform look and feel much harder, not easier.
  - txcwpalpha 6y ago
    You're right, and I did think of that after I clicked "reply". What I meant was that a company with so much resources doesn't seem to have that capability. Even with such a large size, I would imagine Amazon of all companies would have the resources to say "this is the design, now get on board" and make it happen. This goes for other aspects of AWS as well, such as consistency in the way services report to CloudTrail or are referenced in CloudFormation. Overall there just seems to be little coordination amongst AWS teams, and that's always surprised me.
    - TimJRobinson 6y ago
      Teams at AWS are almost like individual companies of 5 - 15 people. When integrating with each other they do it in almost the same way external apps would. The frontend of each app is decided by each team using a shared library for UI styling and some guidelines. This helps with iteration speed and not getting bogged down in middle management approval hell, but it does lead to inconsistency problems.
mNovak 6y ago
As far as I can tell, this is being pitched to teams, not really general purpose applications (as I imagine a highly scalable DB being used for). The pricing is quite high on a per user basis and the 'tables' max out at 100k rows, so not useful for any larger scale data aggregation. Agreed, a seemingly missing feature is how can lambdas or other AWS ecosystem components interact with this data? I could imagine systems where it's nice for "no-code" and "code" to interact cleanly.

brd529 6y ago

My first glance reads it to be more like airtable or even salesforce at some level, which to your point are the modern iterations of access / filemaker. Drag and drop all-in-one database and application designer that by virtue of being online and multi-user make them way more useful.

darepublic 6y ago
Yes my first thought was that this was like Airtable. One of these days one of these no-code solutions is going to actually stick, and I will stop getting paid to basically glue data from different systems together while browsing HN.
basch 6y ago
It's a fairly busy territory as it is, with at least 20 major enterprise players. Microsoft PowerApps with PowerAutomate (formerly Flow, their Zapier/IFTTT) have a huge advantage of being bundled right into other licenses. SalesForce and ServiceNow have similar advantages. Quick Base[1] has to be considered the incumbent. Zoho, Oracle. And then the more independent Appian, Betty Blocks, Mendix, OutSystems. This tends to be one space where consolidation and acquisitions aren't as popular, and the big players have built their own home grown products on top of their stacks. (counterpoint, Kony got snatched up by a fintech software services company, Temenos. Apple acquired Workflow which isnt quite the same thing but a tangent space.) In a lot of cases, its going to make way more sense to go with the Vendor that already provides other parts of your infrastructure. If you're an Oracle company, Oracle Apex is going to be simpler, which is the point of all these offerings. It makes a ton of sense for AWS to provide this naively on top of their already mature offerings. It's also not a space I'd want to enter as an independent startup, from scratch, unless you are sure you can actually offer something better and different. Or, instead of a generic offering, your product is tailored to the specific processes and workflows of certain industries. At this point if you want to join this crowd, it would be a safer bet to hitch your ride to a specific tech company lacking this offering (if there is one left) and become so good that they want to acquire you. Or build a specific subfeature in this space, so one of them gobble you up and tack you onto their product (see 3rd link.) I would guess there is still room for some ERPs to be interested in tacking app builders on, like Infor. https://www.gartner.com/en/documents/3956079/magic-quadrant-for-enterprise-low-code-application-platf https://www.gartner.com/en/documents/3956079/magic-quadrant-... https://imgur.com/kD5hQ46 https://imgur.com/kD5hQ46 https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/microsoft-acquires-softomotive-to-expand-low-code-robotic-process-automation-capabilities-in-microsoft-power-automate/ https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/microsoft-acquires-sof... [1] Somewhat shocked to not see Quick Base mentioned even once in this thread. It's a billion dollar company thats been offering this nonstop for 20 years, and is still relevant.
- wharfjumper 6y ago
  I agree. In our case we're focusing on gathering and sharing information securely (end-to-end encrypted) i.e. Typeform for PII[0] with information verification built-in. There are lots of use-cases for a tool that enables non-coders to incorporate that information collection into their business process (we believe). [0] Personally identifying information

tyhoff 6y ago

I find it most similar to bubble.io, which includes databases but also allows linking to external data sources like Airtable.

dvdhsu 6y ago

Hi there! Founder of Retool (https://retool.com https://retool.com) here (and long-time HN reader). Agreed that Honeycode is adjacent to us. I think an interesting way of viewing the space [1] is who the product is for. There are lots of drag and drop app-builders (e.g. mendix, outsystems, bubble, msft powerapps, amazon honeycode, etc.), but they're all built for non-technical people. Their goal is to make programming more accessible to all. (Which I think is a very noble and very interesting goal!) Our bet, however, is that code is here to stay, since code is actually a pretty efficient way of getting a computer to do something [2]. With that said, though, building specific types of apps (in our case, internal front-end apps today) is surprisingly difficult (have you tried recently!? you have to use react, redux, install 10+ npm modules, etc... just to make a front-end that has a table + POSTs back to your internal API!). And so that's why we're building Retool for engineers, which has resulted in a few interesting decisions: * we are not a system of record, since engineers don't like to move data around. We'll connect to your data, no matter where it is (e.g. postgres, a custom API, salesforce, etc.). * we rely on the user knowing how to write code. I think this is interesting because low-code is good for getting to 50%, 60%, etc. But as you try to get closer and closer to 100%, it becomes harder and harder, since full customizability within a GUI (without code) is just hard (cf 2.). Retool lets you get to 60 - 70% of what you want very quickly, but then relies on you finishing the last ~30% with code, if you really want to. (We provide APIs, let you import custom React components, let you write JS anywhere [3] within {{ }}. this also has led us to embracing git syncing (serializing retool apps as yaml files and syncing them to git repos: https://docs.retool.com/docs/git-syncing https://docs.retool.com/docs/git-syncing ), being on-prem by default (https://docs.retool.com/docs/setup-instructions https://docs.retool.com/docs/setup-instructions), etc. (If anybody is interested in working on this, please email me at david AT retool DOT com. I think there's really a small chance we can really change how business apps are built.) 1. Funnily enough, when we started Retool, there was no low-code / no-code space. If you look at our original Show HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17725966 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17725966), you'll see that nobody mentions "no code", "low code", or anything siilar. It's certainly been fun to watch a "trend" pick up around us, haha. 2. For example, imagine a switch statement. Very simple and concise in most languages, but incredibly hard to implement in a GUI. (A graph with nodes and edges, perhaps?) 3. We secure it by running all JS in a sandboxed iframe.

txcwpalpha 6y ago

>On the other hand, I absolutely loathe every single UI that has ever come out of AWS, and there is absolutely no chance I give the editor they've built here a shot without hearing lots of positive reactions first. I agree so much with this. I hate the AWS console UI so, so much and It blows my mind that such a large company can't seem to even get on the same page about what color scheme or menu bar position they want to use. But actually, I'm messing around with Honeycode right now and although I haven't gotten a chance to really dig deep and test the long-term usability of it, I have to say that so far it is gorgeous and intuitive. If the UI team that worked on this just completely took over the AWS console, I wouldn't complain.

outworlder 6y ago
> It blows my mind that such a large company can't seem to even get on the same page about what color scheme or menu bar position they want to use. Isn't it the other way around? Being a large company makes coordinating on an uniform look and feel much harder, not easier.
- txcwpalpha 6y ago
  You're right, and I did think of that after I clicked "reply". What I meant was that a company with so much resources doesn't seem to have that capability. Even with such a large size, I would imagine Amazon of all companies would have the resources to say "this is the design, now get on board" and make it happen. This goes for other aspects of AWS as well, such as consistency in the way services report to CloudTrail or are referenced in CloudFormation. Overall there just seems to be little coordination amongst AWS teams, and that's always surprised me.
  - TimJRobinson 6y ago
    Teams at AWS are almost like individual companies of 5 - 15 people. When integrating with each other they do it in almost the same way external apps would. The frontend of each app is decided by each team using a shared library for UI styling and some guidelines. This helps with iteration speed and not getting bogged down in middle management approval hell, but it does lead to inconsistency problems.

mNovak 6y ago

As far as I can tell, this is being pitched to teams, not really general purpose applications (as I imagine a highly scalable DB being used for). The pricing is quite high on a per user basis and the 'tables' max out at 100k rows, so not useful for any larger scale data aggregation. Agreed, a seemingly missing feature is how can lambdas or other AWS ecosystem components interact with this data? I could imagine systems where it's nice for "no-code" and "code" to interact cleanly.