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Launch HN: Refine (YC S23) – Open-source platform for enterprise web apps
Hi HN! We’re the co-founders of Refine (https://github.com/refinedev/refine https://github.com/refinedev/refine), an open-source platform for developing enterprise web applications rapidly. In one year since launch we have 15K active developers each month, and over 5K projects in production. Among the 5,000+ projects deployed to production, we see a lot of admin panels, dashboards, B2B portals and SAAS interfaces.
Check out our online generator at (https://refine.dev/#playground https://refine.dev/#playground) to create a custom Refine application and download it.
Before starting refine, we spent five years as a consultancy company building internal-facing applications for enterprise clients. We have seen many complex use cases where the demanded flexibility was much higher than what existing low-code/no-code solutions provide. Moving away from rigid architectures and pre-made components that are difficult to customize, developers tend to start from the scratch. This results in a significant waste of time and resources.
In order to find a sweet spot between “starting from scratch” and higher level solutions, we started working on refine. After a couple of iterations, we came up with a “headless” solution, separating the UI-layer completely from the rest of the frontend logic. This allowed us to support multiple UI frameworks and custom designs out of the box.
We understand the importance of frontend developers working with the stack and tools they love and are familiar with. So, we have built our project creation wizard that allows developers to mix and match their technology stack when creating a project.
After 1.5 years of development with the great support of the open-source community, Refine has become a mature framework that allows developers to rapidly build enterprise applications and have 100% control over their projects.
While remaining unobtrusive, Refine still saves a lot of development resources by eliminating repetitive tasks such as CRUD operations, state management, routing, authentication, access control, and i18n. It’s also backend-agnostic and works with any APIs or services.
The best way to start Refine development is visiting our extensive documentation at (https://refine.dev/docs/ https://refine.dev/docs/). Here, you can also find tutorials and real-life examples to use as a starting point for your use case.
We had one successful Show HN earlier this year (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34515128 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34515128), and have since had several major releases and added many more features.
Recently, we've released our enterprise edition featuring deployments, built-in security, backend integrations and auto-generated UI's. By expanding Refine's capabilities beyond the frontend, the enterprise edition offers a complete solution for the internal tooling requirements of larger organizations. To get more information, please see our pricing page: https://refine.dev/pricing/ https://refine.dev/pricing/.
If you have any questions, ideas or suggestions please share them with us. The team will be here all day to answer. We look forward to all of your comments!
- ayewo 3y agoCongrats on the launch! How does your product compare to Retool and other products in the space including the OSS ones (Appsmith, Windmill, Tooljet etc)?
- hn_throwaway_99 3y agoWill also throw in react-admin there. React-admin is not the same space per se (it's basically a react framework, not a low/no code tool), but if I built an internal admin app in react-admin, what would you say the pros/cons are to moving to Refine?
- omeraplak 3y agorefine's headless architecture offers developers the flexibility to implement their design using any UI framework to their apps. It also comes with built-in UI integrations for popular libraries like Material UI, Ant Design, Chakra UI, and Mantine. With react-admin, you have no choice other than using Material UI for your app. refine's provides nearly all the features of react-admin enterprise provides as open-source. Since refine's architecture is headless, router logic is completely detached from the business logic and UI layer. So you can use refine with React Router, NextJS, Remix, or any other framework may pop-up as long as it's React based. With react-admin, you can only use react-router and it doesn't have a real SSR support, while with refine, you can use SSR frameworks like NextJS and Remix without being limited.
- fzaninotto 3y agoReact-admin lead dev here. Short story: Refine and react-admin were in the same low-code space (targeting developers) until today, but it seems they've pivoted to no-code (targeting non developers) as they go after ReTool. Long story: https://marmelab.com/blog/2023/07/04/react-admin-vs-refine.html https://marmelab.com/blog/2023/07/04/react-admin-vs-refine.h...
- 5Qn8mNbc2FNCiVV 3y agoThat article is top 5% of biased articles I've read in my life. Really bad look to be honest, would have really liked a more objective comparison