As developers ourselves, we faced the problem of building tons of internal admin UIs, backends to connect siloed data, reporting jobs, and data pipelines. For UIs we would build one-off React components. For integrations, we would have to decipher vendor docs and implement auth. Finally, for reporting jobs we had to handle failures and observability – many hours of repetitive engineering effort.
So we built Superblocks, an internal tooling IDE to connect to any datasource (databases, APIs, data warehouses), drag and drop your common UI components (tables, charts, forms), spin up backend APIs and schedule cron jobs, all in one place.
Since developers we spoke to hated repeatedly handling permissions, hooking up observability, configuring security and managing CI/CD pipelines, we built Superblocks to integrate with popular dev tools like Datadog, Elastic, GitHub, GitLab, Okta and more. Use our cloud version, or run a self-hosted agent to ensure your data never leaves your VPC [1].
Superblocks is quite differentiated from other “low-code” tools out there: * 100% built for developers: observability, debuggability, version control, extend with Python & JS * A platform, not a point solution: An all-in-one builder for internal tools: app UIs, APIs and cron jobs * Agent architecture: source-available, stateless and lightweight vs a legacy on-prem deployment * Scalable pricing: Pay for apps by Creator and usage-based pricing for end users (based on day passes) so it’s affordable to have 100s or 1000s of end users. Workflows and Jobs are billed on the number of executions.
A quick 4 min demo on the website: https://cdn.superblocks.com/superblocks-demo-06132022.mp4 Developer docs: https://docs.superblocks.com To illustrate Superblocks in action, we built this startup funding explorer last night [2]
Would love to hear feedback!
[1] Agent https://github.com/superblocksteam/agent [2] Superblocks Startup Explorer App https://app.superblocks.com/applications/4aab03cd-3b18-4138-...
I’m new to the FOSS world and it was quite interesting to see someone use our project to compete with us.
Yes, we do use some Appsmith code (Apache 2.0) in Superblocks specifically related to our frontend drag and drop canvas and components, as part of our UI builder in Superblocks. We’ve evolved our architecture significantly over the past 18 months to support our unique API execution model.
We do not use it in our API builder, workflow builder, scheduled job builder, agent platform, permissions, audit logs, observability, integrations, version control and more, all of which have been built on a different architecture to provide different value to our customers.
What Appsmith has built is impressive and is a good option for customers who may prefer to fork and customize their UI builder or prefer to manage a full on-prem platform themselves. The customers who choose Superblocks are a different group with different needs.
If your intention is not to allow this, you could switch to AGPL.
Been reading the comments and I think there are a bunch of questions about why companies would use a tool like this and that integrating your product / company into it is potentially risky. Here's why we decided to use it.
First thing you should know is that before we moved to Superblocks, we were using a combination of Retool, Google Cloud Scheduler, Mode Analytics, and a few small Google App Engine apps to solve our problems.
There is a whole ecosystem of apps and mini-products our engineering team has to build which require slow-paced maintenance, but are still mission critical to our business. Analytics dashboards, Slack reporters, revenue dashboards, customer service dashboards, Discord bots, etc.
There are plenty of different tools which solve some of those problems in silo, but the main problem (and beauty) of building internal apps is that you can fully solve for your unique business problem. We're a tech-enabled advertising agency (there are a handful of companies like ours in the world) and we both have our own external product as well as a series of internal apps that power our operations.
We decided to move all our internal apps to Superblocks effectively because we could merge a few different platform layer things (Google Cloud Scheduler, App Engine, Mode, Retool) and be able to build much faster within our team. The big thing for us was that we have engineers writing in Python (more data heavy stuff), and engineers writing Javascript. Previously, we had to have them offer APIs to each other and it wasn't as agile as it is today for simple things we had to build for our business stakeholders.
I remember seeing one of our first Workflows on Superblocks when our data scientist built a BigQuery step, a Python step, and then our Javascript engineers grabbing that to do some post-processing with it to display the data and thinking "this is probably how most tiny apps will get built in the future".
I don't want to have infrastructure for every tiny solution I built for our team. I just want things to work.
So without the video I'm struggling to understand what "programming" with superblocks means. Is it drag and drop visual programming? Show me a screengrab. Is it coding? What does the syntax look like?
Is it a mixture of both? I want to see both.
Yes - I'm lazy and probably could have read more but lazy, busy people are good test subjects as they probably make up the majority of eyeballs.
Thanks for the feedback - our docs are more text heavy and might be better suited for skimming. Our quick start guide might be a good starting point: https://docs.superblocks.com/getting-started/5-min-quickstar...
There isn't any drag and drop when it comes to programming in Superblocks. You can write good ol' regular Python/JS to create APIs and program your event handlers in the UI!
To my mind, an amalgam of the gifs on that quickstart should be on your home page as the hero image.
Although, I could see how building an app that uses data across the various SaaS tools a company uses without requiring that data to be dumped into another database could be useful. Maybe I'm missing the point.
As an aside, I'd love to see Retool but for less technical people. Specifically, a way to make Google Sheets available for multiple people in a company to use. We have multiple quick and dirty "calculators" (think pricing for sales, comp for recruiting) that we roll out across our company. Eventually they get operationalized and converted into proper applications (or we buy a SaaS product for it) but would be nice to have an interim solution. Some requirements:
- Ability to create a very simple CRUD web UI
- Authz/n with ability for IT to integrate into their SSO.
- Google Sheets backend and integration so financial analysts can update and manage.
For example you mentioned Retool which has a UI builder, but also Zapier and more recently BI tools. We have a customer who's moving off Tableau which was a surprise at first because Tableau is well designed for fast analysis for SQL-only users and that's not our core audience.
I guess we don't really deliver on what you're looking for wrt an offering for less technical users than developers, because to really be proficient in Superblocks you'll need to understand SQL, calling APIs, Python or JS to get the full value.
regarding Google Sheets integration that is our most popular integration alongside Postgres, the end users can easily user it like a database.
Excited to see where Superblocks goes and whether it embraces that approach in the future.
Is that what what you're referring to?
good usability feedback on the New API part of the UI, we will address this!
What happens if you go out of business or we stop subscribing?
Great question, having been an engineer all my life, this is one of the question I would ask myself as well. Developers are at the forefront of our target audience and we want to give all developers the peace of mind that any code or configuration you create in Superblocks is completed owned by you and can keep working without Superblocks. Here's how:
1. Our agent is open-source, this means you can inspect, modify, build and host it however you like
2. We're soon launching a feature where you can export the entire definition of Superblocks apps/workflow/jobs/permissions as project files and manage it in your own git repo
3. We're brainstorming the idea of exporting your app as native React and NodeJS applications so your app continues to work outside of Superblocks
Obviously our goal is to keep providing the best features, performance and stability so you can save time and let us accelerate your development process :)
Would this give you the confidence to use a platform like this? If not, what can we do better?
Looking at the video, at 1:02 you do put in code to open yourself to SQL injection... it's for internal tools, but still...
Regarding UIPath, we don't yet have RPA as a building block but we have heard this ask before for automated scraping from customers. We are definitely looking into this in the future.
Regarding SQL injection - yes you are right. We have since worked on a feature to add support for writing parameterized SQL in-app. It will be live next week, thanks for the feedback!
For us, as developers, it was critical that this type of tool had to be open source - like the other tools we used and came to love and rely on.
Credit for building the platform. Observability is a great idea and something I've not seen before in low code platforms.
For reference, to the wider community, if you are interested in an open source alternative, here's a link to the Budibase github:
Budibase Github Repo: https://github.com/Budibase/budibase
Appsmith is another open source alternative.
We evaluated all of the low-code builders in the market (including both paid and open source) and eventually decided to use Superblocks for some of our core operational tools and workflows due to the power & flexibility of the tool, the focus on access & security, the team's unparalleled support and the pricing model.
It's been great working with the team and they've been nothing short of fantastic. We can't wait to build more with Superblocks and see what they release next.
> Is this open source
Although the app builder you see on the cloud is not open source, we offer a hybrid deployment option - the on-premise agent (OPA) is our execution engine that runs all of the code that you write in Superblocks. It is source available https://github.com/superblocksteam/agent and you can self-host it to ensure your data stays within your network. Feel free to check out the github repo or our docs (https://docs.superblocks.com/on-premise-agent/overview) for more details!
> demo is really slow on my phone
Sorry to hear that! The one on https://superblocks.com loads faster.
You say source-available, but I do wonder what happens with all your apps/workflows if Superblocks goes belly up. It doesn't seem like there’d be an easy way to migrate off it. With Camunda, their modeler and engine is open source and all the code you write is like any other code—it exists in your own git repo.
(PS: Not a Camunda shill, but have built proofs-of-concept with it in the past, and am evaluating it again.)
Our approach is somewhat akin to say Datadog where they have an agent that you run, but the UI is hosted.
The approach we took was to give customers a) ability to keep data in their VPC, b) security teams can audit anything running in their network, c) anything non-sensitive doesn't need to be hosted by the customer to make it simpler to run/manage.
Would be curious what you think of this hybrid approach and if there are further design decisions we could make that could be useful for us to incorporate?
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[0] https://assets-global.website-files.com/627d359d0e0aa265b781...
E: Fix formatting (TIL HN doesn't support code blocks)
When we speak to customers, the thing that resonates most is the speed of higher-order primitives, with the flexibility of code. The best of both worlds. This has guided our product philosophy entirely and even custom components are in beta which you can sign up for here:
> while keeping Superblocks up-to-date from our cloud
Does that mean that the OPA auto updates? Or is it saying that I can configure the frontend to use a custom backend?
We get compared to stuff like Retool, Zapier, BI tools and other low-code tools quite often, but the main differences are in the breadth of the product and most importantly how focused on developers and code (Python and JS for now, other language in the future) the product is to make things extensible. Basically we wanted to replace all the internal tooling we've built and used at previous companies we've worked at. A lot of it is too complex for the popular low code tools of today.
We are a ways away from achieving that mission, but think there is an approach that can work if focused entirely on developers.
Component reuse is something we are tackling on our end. We are working on a custom components feature so that you can bring your own components to Superblocks and reuse them across applications. Would that help replace some of the heavyweight tools you currently prefer to build in React?
https://docs.superblocks.com/software-development-lifecycle/...
We got some feedback recently that customers wanted to manage this all using their own CI/CD pipeline so we're working toward enabling this very soon. A GitOps feature would allow you to manage everything via your typical process in Github/Gitlab etc including code reviews and team hierarchies on who can deploy code.
In terms of role based access control, we have a set of permissions you can set at the job, workflow and app level for access to Own, Edit, or Use. Also Permissions groups can be accessed via code to do business logic around the groups for more fine-grained controls. There are also permissions at the integration level because you may want developer A to access postgres, but not developer B from another team.
https://docs.superblocks.com/account-management/permissions-...
Still both pretty deep areas we are learning more as our customer base scales so open to feedback!
interesting markets in this could be tying to legal, real-estate, construction, hospitality, etc - obv a stretch goal or at least something to just consider how to accommodate.
tl;dr, they did not read the FAQ and broke the HN rule are thinking of
Sorry to be that guy, but I would never rely the business core on a company like that. That's why I like Tooljet: https://www.tooljet.com (no affiliation) - they are open source. That mitigates the risk to a level that I'd personally accept.
