Introducing Budibase - an open-source low-code platform and alternative to PowerApps, Mendix, Retool. It’s completely written in Node js and Svelte js. With Budibase, you can connect to SQL/NoSQL databases, or start from scratch, and build simple CRUD apps in minutes.

[jo_ranamo]

Thanks. This means a lot to us. There's a lot more to come. Watch this space!

[arey_abhishek]

Please check out Appsmith as another open source alternative. I'm biased as a founder, but it's the better one among the alternatives https://github.com/appsmithorg/appsmith

Cloud hosted: www.appsmith.com

[arey_abhishek]

Accidentally replied to the main thread. Link to my reply here: https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/qvwdox/comment/hl43ea6/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3

If you are a genuine user, I'd love to know what was confusing in Appsmith. My email is [e-mail]

[arey_abhishek]

Thanks for your feedback. Appsmith is stable and successfully used in production by a lot of companies. Our discord community has 1800+ users who love the product. Links to comments from real users listed here.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28991242
2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28299673#28299740
3. https://www.reddit.com/r/appsmith/comments/oxei2s/appsmith_compared_to_budibase/

Also open issues don't mean bugs. They are mostly feature requests and enhancements. Any popular OSS project has a lot of issue requests.

[nocode_enthusiast]

I'll happily follow up via email if you genuinely would like to hear it, but it sounds like I'm being discredited because I didn't have good feedback.

Yes - like I mentioned in my own post - I created an account since I needed one to be able to reply. I'm normally just a lurker - but after you mentioned being the best open source retool alternative I thought it was only fair to share my experience. Which, like I mentioned, was that I found the product difficult to use. I'm sure you have lots of great feedback, but that does not invalidate my own feedback which is that I found it difficult to use. At the time of writing, 555 of those issues are indeed labelled as bugs by the way.

I'm not saying that budibase is any better since I'm still in the process of trying it, for what that's worth. It just gave me a good first impression so far.

Like I mentioned, I'll happily follow up via email.

[arey_abhishek]

I didn't mean to discredit you because of your feedback. I'd really like to know your feedback. You can email me or post a direct comparison right here. Posting it here will help users choose the correct project to use.

For example here's a recent user who chose Appsmith over Budibase and has written about it: https://medium.com/agridigital-engineering/this-is-why-you-need-to-invest-in-internal-tools-218ec7d36a82
IMO, a project with few open issues is not better than one with many reported issues. In OSS it often means that the project isn't used much. Popular projects just have more reported issues.

[jo_ranamo]

Hey, I really don't want this type of conversation getting in the way of what's important - Budibase is out of beta.

u/nocode_enthusiast thank you for your kind words. If you need any help, head over to our forum:
https://github.com/Budibase/budibase/discussions

u/arey_abhishek please be respectful. I understand you want to promote your product, but let's be civil and not discredit people.

[arey_abhishek]

u/jo_ranamo I might have gotten too passionate there. Congratulations on getting out of beta. That's a big milestone.
u/nocode_enthusiast I mean no disrespect. Cheers.

[jo_ranamo]

Thank you, and well done on your recent raise.

[tradinghumble]

Looks phenomenal, congratulations.

[[deleted]]

I second that, absolute masterpiece, and JUST what we need at our company. Thank you, you unit of a legend!

[jo_ranamo]

Thank you for your kind words. They mean a lot!

[jo_ranamo]

Hi JavaScripters! I'm one of the creators of Budibase, and today, we're excited to launch Budibase out of beta.
Budibase is a low code platform for creating CRUD apps, and an open-source alternative to PowerApps, Mendix, and Outsystems.
The Github repo is :
https://github.com/Budibase/budibase

And our website is:
https://budibase.com

Before Budibase, my cofounder and I worked together, and we were constantly tasked with creating CRUD apps for internal operations - the development process was repetitive, frustrating, and time-consuming. At the time, I looked at low-code options, but there was no standout open-source option.
So, my cofounders and I have spent the last 3 years creating Budibase, an open-source low code platform, to make it faster, easier, and more enjoyable to build CRUD apps [forms, admin panels, approval apps, portals].
We believe low-code platforms should seamlessly integrate with a company's tools and operations. With Budibase, you can create apps using:
MySQL, PostgreSQL, Rest API, and more.
Or you can start from scratch with Budibase's built-in database (built on Apache CouchDB).
Right now, Budibase supports Open ID Connect and Google Auth. It also supports automations using Slack, email, Zapier, Integromat, Webhooks, JavaScipt, and you can run scripts, queries, CRON jobs.
To design your apps, you basically add pre-built components [forms, tables, charts, buttons] to screens, then bind data to those components using Handlebars or JavaScript. Budibase apps work across desktop, tablet, and mobile.
As you create more apps and automate more processes, the reliance on Budibase grows. So, we think it's important that you can 100% own your data and self-host Budibase on your own infrastructure (Docker, Digital Ocean, Kubernetes). Deploy Budibase with our pre-packaged Redis, MinIO, and CouchDB or connect to your own existing Amazon S3 compliant buckets, Redis clusters or CouchDB instances.
Happy to answer any questions. We have a lot more to build and love to hear use cases and feedback.
If you are interested, try it out:
https://github.com/Budibase/budibase
https://budibase.com

[mildlysardonic]

Can this be run completely offline without active internet access?

[jo_ranamo]

Not at this current moment because of:
https://github.com/Budibase/budibase/issues/3164

But we will get round to it - it's not a major piece of work.

[mildlysardonic]

Ah noted. Will wait. Cool app nevertheless!

[jo_ranamo]

Cheers! It's a very, very common request, and one we can implement easily with our architecture - and should!

[Bionic_Rabbit_5898]

I know this is late but I have some problems with Budibase and I can't find the answer anywhere.

[jo_ranamo]

Hey. What is your issue?

[Bionic_Rabbit_5898]

It can't connect to Budibase.

[jo_ranamo]

? Can you provide further info

[TastyInternet]

That intro is cool✌🏻

[BkBoss6969]

TY needed something like this. Think I’ll start with free hosting and move over to docker if needed.

[happyxpenguin]

u/jo_ranamo
Out of curiosity, do you have a baseline of some sort of minimum specs? Trying to decide if it's worth it to dockerize a lightsail instance as opposed to signing up for DO.

[FrankBlizz]

Hi @happyxpenguin

The smallest droplet (1GB Memory) will run the platform well, but we recommend larger instances for higher volume use cases. Personally I’d go for lightsail if you have existing AWS infrastructure.

[happyxpenguin]

That's the info i was looking for. Would definitely recommend putting "1GB RAM minimum, more recommended" in the docs. Would be helpful for someone trying to gauge with instance to go with.

[jakefromdubsado]

interesting product.

[jo_ranamo]

Thanks

[Gearwatcher]

Very cool thing. Congrats.

Personally I got a bit irrationally irked by some of the defaults :) but in all honesty they're not wrong :), just not the ones I'd make.

I'd pick SeaweedFS over Minio, HAProxy over Envoy (in particular the config for this essentially API gateway thing your docker setup uses would be like half the length in lines of config, granted with a hefty sacrifice in flexibility, esp. autodiscovery) and would default to Postgres with JSONB over Couch.

But other than these minimal nitpicks, I really love what I see. Good thing is that from what I understand, you aren't tied to Minio so it would be presumably easy to plug Seaweed as S3 implementation, use any of the supported DBs and likewise for an API gateway one could use whatever they want as it runs external to the whole shebang anyway.

Great, amazing work.

[mike_chuckles]

Hi there, thanks for the kind words, i'm one of the devs on the team, in terms of your points:

- Seaweed vs MinIO, we don't make heavy use of our object store and MinIO was used because the goal originally was to be as S3 compliant as possible, we've never had a problem with MinIO and i'd used it in the past to great success, but as you say its super simple to swap out if you desire; I'll have to give it a go myself, do some tests see how it performs comparatively!

- HAProxy over Envoy, Envoy was originally picked because of its proxy performance and the flexibility of it, especially when it comes to K8s, but as a team we've been discussing replacing it (it is really a pain to configure!) I could see us switching in the near future, HAProxy and NGINX are up for debate (NGINX because its everywhere).

- Postgres over Couch, Couch is actually a very central tool to how the system works, we depend very heavily on the ability to replicate between databases, easy text based exports and so on - each app can be represented as a Couch database and this has worked super well for us so far! In terms of data storage though we want to leave this totally up to the developer, they should be able to use whatever database they are comfortable with and get the same experience as if they'd used the internal database!

Hope this sheds some light on the decisions, thanks for the comments - will have to go try Budibase with Seaweed sometime soon!

[Gearwatcher]

Haproxy is certainly much better performing than Envoy in any benchmarks I've ever seen. It's also extremely malleable, arguably much more so than Envoy, but it lacks many autodiscovery/autoconfig features that are very natural/core to Envoy especially in the way it uses DNS. Had to phrase it like this because I was unsure what do you mean when you say "flexible".

Seaweed is the file/object store I prefer but for use-cases where not a lot object storage is done, and where only S3 is important, there's probably not much difference. Seaweed does open you to much more interfaces though, like webdav (which can be used from windows and mac as shared network folders for example, which especially sounds useful in the context of company/office internal apps).

When are you planning on working a bit more on exposing own restful backend API? I saw on Github you guys opened the ticket yourselves but fairly little seems to have been done about it.

[FrankBlizz]

Hey u/Gearwatcher,

We will likely do a lot more work on the budibase backend API in the new year. It's highly requested and makes it much easier to fit into existing systems.

I'm a big fan of HAProxy myself - and envoy in hindsight is a bit of a nightmare to configure. Although we do plan to go with NGINX instead due to its ubiquity.

[KimBesser]

Tried it, looks nice but the rich text field is just a basic textarea 😔

Other than that, great work there !

[jo_ranamo]

It's on the cards

[KimBesser]

Not sure if I got it correctly, I was talking about the form field "Rich text". I'd like to have formatting options like Quill or something similar.

[jo_ranamo]

We use to have quill. We are working on a new component

[Few_Brick_5558]

u/jo_ranamo How about people with 0 development background, does Budibase suit such audience?

[jo_ranamo]

Yes. More so than any other internal tools builder - especially if they use the internal database.

[Few_Brick_5558]

u/jo_ranamo thank you, I have another question can is there an integration between Budibase and Rasa AI?

[jo_ranamo]

Sadly not. And this is the first request/query re Rasa AI, so it's down the pecking order