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Show HN: ToolJet 2.0 – Open-source alternative to Power Apps and Retool

210 points by navaneethpk 4y ago

brunoqc 4y ago
ToolJet should be added to https://sso.tax/ https://sso.tax/.
- jonas-w 4y ago
  https://github.com/robchahin/sso-wall-of-shame/issues https://github.com/robchahin/sso-wall-of-shame/issues
- vosper 4y ago
  Should it? It doesn't have paid-but-no-SSO tiers. It only has "free" or "paid which includes SSO". So I don't think it's fair to say there's an SSO tax with this one. I don't think we get to expect SSO on free things. I don't love mysterious "enterprise" pricing, but I don't know if there's a wall of shame for that :)
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
newmac 4y ago
My question is a bit of a non sequitur, but I noticed that your project took off pretty quickly out of the gate. Congrats! I am curious what non-HN places have resulted in that level of interest in the project?
- navaneethpk 4y ago
  Reddit has given us a lot of users. Especially r/selfhosted.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
AnhTho_FR 4y ago
It's amazing to see the landscape of open-source internal tool maturing, this release of tooljet look great. There are also other tools like windmill.dev that support complex workflows and serverless endpoints, and budibase that focus on no-code administration panel. The future is open-source!
- jstephan 4y ago
  I've also been a happy user of Windmill.dev. I guess ToolJet has more of a low-code focus with their drag and drop builder, while Windmill is more focused on developers who want to turn their scripts into production workflows. Very excited to see all these open-source projects take off in the internal tooling space. I regret how much time I spent building custom DIY tooling at previous jobs!
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
jeffhollan 4y ago
This is very cool! Added to my list of stuff to play with next time I have some cycles
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
GICodeWarrior 4y ago
How can ToolJet relicense AGPL contributions to a less restrictive license? The code is AGPL and accepts volunteer contributions under that license. https://github.com/ToolJet/ToolJet/blob/develop/CONTRIBUTING.md#any-contributions-you-make-will-be-under-the-agpl-v3-license https://github.com/ToolJet/ToolJet/blob/develop/CONTRIBUTING... However, in their AGPL announcement it says: > We do have a commercial license that overrides the AGPL license. This commercial license allows organizations to make changes to ToolJet and provide it as a service. https://blog.tooljet.com/changing-license-to-agpl/#what-someone-you-really-wants-to-create-a-derivative-work-and-sell-as-a-service https://blog.tooljet.com/changing-license-to-agpl/#what-some... Does the hosted ToolJet service include unreleased code, leveraging this commercial license? Every volunteer contributor would need to agree to relicensing and/or would need to have previously agreed to assign their copyright to ToolJet, right?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- navaneethpk 4y ago
  Contributors have to agree to a contributor license agreement (CLA) when they create their first PR.
haolez 4y ago
I wanted to use ToolJet in my company, but SSO has been playing an important role for my company's security and compliance needs, even though we have only around 100 people. I'm getting lazy to adopt any product that doesn't provide that to me (for a reasonable price). In the case of no/low-code tools, Budibase[1] offers SSO on its open source edition, which makes it easier for me to adopt it and gain confidence in the product before committing to an enterprise plan with obscure prices and shady sales techniques. But it's a shame, since the competitors in this space are awesome (ToolJet, AppSmith, NocoDB, Baserow, etc) but rarely consider SSO as a simple and basic feature. They usually put SSO as an enterprise feature in the highest price tier possible. Btw, Grist[2] is another honorable mention in this space with open source support for SSO. [1]https://budibase.com/ https://budibase.com/ [2]https://www.getgrist.com/ https://www.getgrist.com/
- rishabhkaul1 4y ago
  Hey! Rishabh from Appsmith here. Thanks for mentioning Appsmith! Just to clarify, at Appsmith, we offer SSO (OIDC, SAML) in our paid plan (appsmith.com/pricing) - where you pay a maximum of $20/user/month (with many customers paying lesser than that as they add more users). Infact it's the only plan we have. Do check it out.
  - rishabhkaul1 4y ago
    For forgot to mention, Google and Github SSO are part of the Appsmith community edition. The other thing to also note is that we don't put a limit on the number of users that can be added to the paid plan. This doesn't apply to Tooljet coz it only has custom pricing, but with the other players you will notice that typically you get upgraded to either a higher tier plan or a higher minimum $ commitment, as you add more users, even if you don't want the features of those higher tiers.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
bitlad 4y ago
I have seen appsmith and tooljet in the space. Played around with them for a while. What I am super scared of is pricing. Though it is free and opensource. I love that, moment you ask me to pay. I am going to opt Retool as it is more enterprise ready from perception wise. Even superblocks that cloned and copied appsmith, I am willing to pay for them as there is trust of some sorts as they have certain upfront pricing. Not having upfront cost can. be very deceptive.
- rishabhkaul1 4y ago
  Do check out appsmith.com/pricing , we've tried to be upfront, happy to answer any questions you might have :)
- rubenfiszel 4y ago
  https://windmill.dev https://windmill.dev also has upfront pricing
metadat 4y ago
Previous discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31263487 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31263487 (May 2022, 12 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27421408 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27421408 (June 2021, 68 comments)
Saris 4y ago
Somewhat funny bug, after running via docker and getting to the initial account creation webpage, the email field has a limit of 25 characters and won't accept my email. I changed the character limit in the browser dev tools and it accepts the email and works just fine. I think the limit for an email address is 254 characters, so maybe someone just forgot the '4'!
- jay-barronville 4y ago
  Side note: This is why backend validations are necessary. When the frontend validations are crappy, it does help if the backend doesn’t validate, but when the validations are good, they can usually easily be bypassed if the backend doesn’t validate (not to mention the potential security vulnerabilities that can exist because of this). But I digress . . .
- navaneethpk 4y ago
  Thanks for reporting, fixing this asap.
ajitgoel 4y ago
There should be a tier between free and enterprise, with granular access control like for small saas companies.
- navaneethpk 4y ago
  Right, we are exploring this as well but don't have a solid plan yet. Since the pricing is custom, we try to provide a plan that works for a specific customer.
SheldonSU 4y ago
Hi sorry for the stupid question I'm doing product marketing at a startup, not really a tech guy The furthest I've tried building my own tools is using Zapier and Segment My question: If I'd like to start with tooljet and build tools that can sync and manipulate data across platform, what coding skills should I learn, or where can I start in general? Further, I'd really like to explore more about what I can do with tooljet from a product marketing and analytics perspective. Appreciate any advice thanks
lessbones 4y ago
I had recently been looking at ToolJet to build an internal app for my printing company-- essentially I'm looking for something to use as a filemaker type system. I want to make job tickets for print jobs, essentially just searchable text with a thumbnail image preview (or two or three) representative of the contents of the job and then details on media and print settings. All of this is fairly straightforward except for the image part. Ideally I'd be able to drag and drop a thumbnail into the "file upload" widget and have it appear in the "image" widget, but this is where I'm getting stuck. I realize it is possible to store image files in a SQL database, but I'm not sure if this is my best option. I'm very much a "no-code" or "low-code" target, as i'm not a programmer, but i know my way around a linux terminal, and I host some docker instances in which i've interacted with sql databases before. But I feel like if a tool like this is going to catch on with anyone less competent than someone fluent in at least one programming language, I'm a pretty good test case for what that could look like-- Honestly I wish there were a more traditional forum, I'm really not a fan of the current trend to have all discussion on a slack/discord channel where the information isn't threaded by topic, and is constantly at risk of being lost forever if the slack subscription stops being paid past 10,000 recent posts... *edit: formatting
- bdcravens 4y ago
  You don't want to indent your paragraphs here, as that converts it to a fixed width font (that's more for showing a short code snippet) Just put a line break instead.
vicsomething 4y ago
Hey folks! Congrats on your 2.0 version. I spot you guys were on the top 3 of Product Hunt, that's great! We are building something new at ILLACloud as well. Repo link here: https://github.com/illacloud/illa-builder https://github.com/illacloud/illa-builder
navaneethpk 4y ago
Hi HN, Founder here, ToolJet’s story began when I launched beta version of ToolJet in June 2021 on HackerNews ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27421408](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27421408) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27421408](https://news....). It was very overwhelming to see the repository getting more than a thousand GitHub stars within less than 8 hours of launch. Since then we’ve grown into 16,000 stars and 300 contributors on GitHub. 1000s of teams are now using ToolJet to build and maintain their internal tools. Today, we are excited to launch ToolJet 2.0. We believe that any piece of software that has access to sensitive data of companies/people should be open-source and hosted on premises. Along with a strong focus on data privacy, we’ve also made sure that ToolJet as a platform is extremely flexible. What is ToolJet? ToolJet is an *open-source low-code framework* to build and deploy internal tools quickly. Those who already understands the low-code landscape, ToolJet is an open-source alternative to Microsoft Power Apps and Retool. ToolJet has integrations with data sources, such as databases (like PostgreSQL, MongoDB, MS SQL Server, SnowFlake, etc), API endpoints (with support for OAuth2 authorization), external services ( Airtable, Stripe, Slack, Google Sheets, Notion, etc) and even cloud storage services ( S3, GCS, Minio ). What’s new? - Redesigned every screen with a heavy focus on user experience. - Added in-built no-code database. This feature is built on top of PostgreSQL so that the self-hosted users can take advantage of capabilities of SQL as well. - Support for multi-page applications. - Realtime multiplayer editing so that changes from one user will not override the changes from another user. - Support for using Python ( along with already supported JavaScript ). You can use Python even for interacting with UI components. - Every installation of ToolJet can now have multiple workspaces. Each workspace can have their own SSO config and users. - ToolJet now has more than 50 data source integrations. You can also build custom connectors for ToolJet using our Plugin Development Kit ( [https://www.npmjs.com/package/@tooljet/cli](https://www.npmjs.com/package/@tooljet/cli) https://www.npmjs.com/package/@tooljet/cli](https://www.npmj... ). - We added a bunch of new UI components. Even complicated ones like Calendar and Kanban board. You can also import your own React components and use them within ToolJet apps. - ToolJet is now available in 8 languages including Spanish, Italian, German, French & Russian. - More test coverage using Cypress. We now have dedicated team members for improving test coverage. We are still very early in our journey and there is a lot more to build. Constant feedback from the open-source community is the reason why we are here, any feedback is appreciated and happy to answer any questions.
tylersgordon 4y ago
Wow this is really impressive! It has improved so much. Best low-code tool out there right now.
satvikpendem 4y ago
How does it compare with AppSmith and Budibase?
- omnibrain 4y ago
  Half a year ago I evaluated various low/no code tools and settled for Budibase in the process. I can't say much about ToolJet because I could not get the docker container to run on my MacBook Pro (M1) back then. I really liked the form editor and the inbuilt table control of AppSmith. But as I had to build something for a customer where various (external) users could access some data I chose Budbase, because it supports lots of users in a few different roles. The inbuilt database was also something only Budibase offered back then. But that's something ToolJet also offers (nowadays?).
  - manojlds 4y ago
    In built database is one of the features of this highlighted 2.0 release here. I liked Budibase as well, and Tooljet seemed nascent but has improved now in this to be closer I guess. Need to play with it.
    - omnibrain 4y ago
      I'm also going to give it another try, if I find the time. For a "real" Application I'm currently looking at Supabase for the backend and vue.js+Quasar for the Frontend.

210 points by navaneethpk 4y ago

brunoqc 4y ago

ToolJet should be added to https://sso.tax/ https://sso.tax/.

jonas-w 4y ago
https://github.com/robchahin/sso-wall-of-shame/issues https://github.com/robchahin/sso-wall-of-shame/issues
vosper 4y ago
Should it? It doesn't have paid-but-no-SSO tiers. It only has "free" or "paid which includes SSO". So I don't think it's fair to say there's an SSO tax with this one. I don't think we get to expect SSO on free things. I don't love mysterious "enterprise" pricing, but I don't know if there's a wall of shame for that :)
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

newmac 4y ago

My question is a bit of a non sequitur, but I noticed that your project took off pretty quickly out of the gate. Congrats! I am curious what non-HN places have resulted in that level of interest in the project?

navaneethpk 4y ago
Reddit has given us a lot of users. Especially r/selfhosted.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

AnhTho_FR 4y ago

It's amazing to see the landscape of open-source internal tool maturing, this release of tooljet look great. There are also other tools like windmill.dev that support complex workflows and serverless endpoints, and budibase that focus on no-code administration panel. The future is open-source!

jstephan 4y ago
I've also been a happy user of Windmill.dev. I guess ToolJet has more of a low-code focus with their drag and drop builder, while Windmill is more focused on developers who want to turn their scripts into production workflows. Very excited to see all these open-source projects take off in the internal tooling space. I regret how much time I spent building custom DIY tooling at previous jobs!
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

jeffhollan 4y ago

This is very cool! Added to my list of stuff to play with next time I have some cycles

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

GICodeWarrior 4y ago

How can ToolJet relicense AGPL contributions to a less restrictive license? The code is AGPL and accepts volunteer contributions under that license. https://github.com/ToolJet/ToolJet/blob/develop/CONTRIBUTING.md#any-contributions-you-make-will-be-under-the-agpl-v3-license https://github.com/ToolJet/ToolJet/blob/develop/CONTRIBUTING... However, in their AGPL announcement it says: > We do have a commercial license that overrides the AGPL license. This commercial license allows organizations to make changes to ToolJet and provide it as a service. https://blog.tooljet.com/changing-license-to-agpl/#what-someone-you-really-wants-to-create-a-derivative-work-and-sell-as-a-service https://blog.tooljet.com/changing-license-to-agpl/#what-some... Does the hosted ToolJet service include unreleased code, leveraging this commercial license? Every volunteer contributor would need to agree to relicensing and/or would need to have previously agreed to assign their copyright to ToolJet, right?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
navaneethpk 4y ago
Contributors have to agree to a contributor license agreement (CLA) when they create their first PR.

haolez 4y ago

I wanted to use ToolJet in my company, but SSO has been playing an important role for my company's security and compliance needs, even though we have only around 100 people. I'm getting lazy to adopt any product that doesn't provide that to me (for a reasonable price). In the case of no/low-code tools, Budibase[1] offers SSO on its open source edition, which makes it easier for me to adopt it and gain confidence in the product before committing to an enterprise plan with obscure prices and shady sales techniques. But it's a shame, since the competitors in this space are awesome (ToolJet, AppSmith, NocoDB, Baserow, etc) but rarely consider SSO as a simple and basic feature. They usually put SSO as an enterprise feature in the highest price tier possible. Btw, Grist[2] is another honorable mention in this space with open source support for SSO. [1]https://budibase.com/ https://budibase.com/ [2]https://www.getgrist.com/ https://www.getgrist.com/

rishabhkaul1 4y ago
Hey! Rishabh from Appsmith here. Thanks for mentioning Appsmith! Just to clarify, at Appsmith, we offer SSO (OIDC, SAML) in our paid plan (appsmith.com/pricing) - where you pay a maximum of $20/user/month (with many customers paying lesser than that as they add more users). Infact it's the only plan we have. Do check it out.
- rishabhkaul1 4y ago
  For forgot to mention, Google and Github SSO are part of the Appsmith community edition. The other thing to also note is that we don't put a limit on the number of users that can be added to the paid plan. This doesn't apply to Tooljet coz it only has custom pricing, but with the other players you will notice that typically you get upgraded to either a higher tier plan or a higher minimum $ commitment, as you add more users, even if you don't want the features of those higher tiers.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

bitlad 4y ago

I have seen appsmith and tooljet in the space. Played around with them for a while. What I am super scared of is pricing. Though it is free and opensource. I love that, moment you ask me to pay. I am going to opt Retool as it is more enterprise ready from perception wise. Even superblocks that cloned and copied appsmith, I am willing to pay for them as there is trust of some sorts as they have certain upfront pricing. Not having upfront cost can. be very deceptive.

rishabhkaul1 4y ago
Do check out appsmith.com/pricing , we've tried to be upfront, happy to answer any questions you might have :)
rubenfiszel 4y ago
https://windmill.dev https://windmill.dev also has upfront pricing

metadat 4y ago

Previous discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31263487 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31263487 (May 2022, 12 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27421408 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27421408 (June 2021, 68 comments)

Saris 4y ago

Somewhat funny bug, after running via docker and getting to the initial account creation webpage, the email field has a limit of 25 characters and won't accept my email. I changed the character limit in the browser dev tools and it accepts the email and works just fine. I think the limit for an email address is 254 characters, so maybe someone just forgot the '4'!

jay-barronville 4y ago
Side note: This is why backend validations are necessary. When the frontend validations are crappy, it does help if the backend doesn’t validate, but when the validations are good, they can usually easily be bypassed if the backend doesn’t validate (not to mention the potential security vulnerabilities that can exist because of this). But I digress . . .
navaneethpk 4y ago
Thanks for reporting, fixing this asap.

ajitgoel 4y ago

There should be a tier between free and enterprise, with granular access control like for small saas companies.

navaneethpk 4y ago
Right, we are exploring this as well but don't have a solid plan yet. Since the pricing is custom, we try to provide a plan that works for a specific customer.

SheldonSU 4y ago

Hi sorry for the stupid question I'm doing product marketing at a startup, not really a tech guy The furthest I've tried building my own tools is using Zapier and Segment My question: If I'd like to start with tooljet and build tools that can sync and manipulate data across platform, what coding skills should I learn, or where can I start in general? Further, I'd really like to explore more about what I can do with tooljet from a product marketing and analytics perspective. Appreciate any advice thanks

lessbones 4y ago

I had recently been looking at ToolJet to build an internal app for my printing company-- essentially I'm looking for something to use as a filemaker type system. I want to make job tickets for print jobs, essentially just searchable text with a thumbnail image preview (or two or three) representative of the contents of the job and then details on media and print settings. All of this is fairly straightforward except for the image part. Ideally I'd be able to drag and drop a thumbnail into the "file upload" widget and have it appear in the "image" widget, but this is where I'm getting stuck. I realize it is possible to store image files in a SQL database, but I'm not sure if this is my best option. I'm very much a "no-code" or "low-code" target, as i'm not a programmer, but i know my way around a linux terminal, and I host some docker instances in which i've interacted with sql databases before. But I feel like if a tool like this is going to catch on with anyone less competent than someone fluent in at least one programming language, I'm a pretty good test case for what that could look like-- Honestly I wish there were a more traditional forum, I'm really not a fan of the current trend to have all discussion on a slack/discord channel where the information isn't threaded by topic, and is constantly at risk of being lost forever if the slack subscription stops being paid past 10,000 recent posts... *edit: formatting

bdcravens 4y ago
You don't want to indent your paragraphs here, as that converts it to a fixed width font (that's more for showing a short code snippet) Just put a line break instead.

vicsomething 4y ago

Hey folks! Congrats on your 2.0 version. I spot you guys were on the top 3 of Product Hunt, that's great! We are building something new at ILLACloud as well. Repo link here: https://github.com/illacloud/illa-builder https://github.com/illacloud/illa-builder

navaneethpk 4y ago

Hi HN, Founder here, ToolJet’s story began when I launched beta version of ToolJet in June 2021 on HackerNews ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27421408](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27421408) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27421408](https://news....). It was very overwhelming to see the repository getting more than a thousand GitHub stars within less than 8 hours of launch. Since then we’ve grown into 16,000 stars and 300 contributors on GitHub. 1000s of teams are now using ToolJet to build and maintain their internal tools. Today, we are excited to launch ToolJet 2.0. We believe that any piece of software that has access to sensitive data of companies/people should be open-source and hosted on premises. Along with a strong focus on data privacy, we’ve also made sure that ToolJet as a platform is extremely flexible. What is ToolJet? ToolJet is an *open-source low-code framework* to build and deploy internal tools quickly. Those who already understands the low-code landscape, ToolJet is an open-source alternative to Microsoft Power Apps and Retool. ToolJet has integrations with data sources, such as databases (like PostgreSQL, MongoDB, MS SQL Server, SnowFlake, etc), API endpoints (with support for OAuth2 authorization), external services ( Airtable, Stripe, Slack, Google Sheets, Notion, etc) and even cloud storage services ( S3, GCS, Minio ). What’s new? - Redesigned every screen with a heavy focus on user experience. - Added in-built no-code database. This feature is built on top of PostgreSQL so that the self-hosted users can take advantage of capabilities of SQL as well. - Support for multi-page applications. - Realtime multiplayer editing so that changes from one user will not override the changes from another user. - Support for using Python ( along with already supported JavaScript ). You can use Python even for interacting with UI components. - Every installation of ToolJet can now have multiple workspaces. Each workspace can have their own SSO config and users. - ToolJet now has more than 50 data source integrations. You can also build custom connectors for ToolJet using our Plugin Development Kit ( [https://www.npmjs.com/package/@tooljet/cli](https://www.npmjs.com/package/@tooljet/cli) https://www.npmjs.com/package/@tooljet/cli](https://www.npmj... ). - We added a bunch of new UI components. Even complicated ones like Calendar and Kanban board. You can also import your own React components and use them within ToolJet apps. - ToolJet is now available in 8 languages including Spanish, Italian, German, French & Russian. - More test coverage using Cypress. We now have dedicated team members for improving test coverage. We are still very early in our journey and there is a lot more to build. Constant feedback from the open-source community is the reason why we are here, any feedback is appreciated and happy to answer any questions.

tylersgordon 4y ago

Wow this is really impressive! It has improved so much. Best low-code tool out there right now.

satvikpendem 4y ago

How does it compare with AppSmith and Budibase?

omnibrain 4y ago
Half a year ago I evaluated various low/no code tools and settled for Budibase in the process. I can't say much about ToolJet because I could not get the docker container to run on my MacBook Pro (M1) back then. I really liked the form editor and the inbuilt table control of AppSmith. But as I had to build something for a customer where various (external) users could access some data I chose Budbase, because it supports lots of users in a few different roles. The inbuilt database was also something only Budibase offered back then. But that's something ToolJet also offers (nowadays?).
- manojlds 4y ago
  In built database is one of the features of this highlighted 2.0 release here. I liked Budibase as well, and Tooljet seemed nascent but has improved now in this to be closer I guess. Need to play with it.
  - omnibrain 4y ago
    I'm also going to give it another try, if I find the time. For a "real" Application I'm currently looking at Supabase for the backend and vue.js+Quasar for the Frontend.