Show HN: Superblocks – IDE for Internal Apps, APIs and Cron Jobs(superblocks.com)
superblocks.com
Show HN: Superblocks – IDE for Internal Apps, APIs and Cron Jobs
https://www.superblocks.com/
101 comments
I am a co-founder of a competing OSS product called Appsmith. I discovered Superblocks early this year and my first reaction was that the UI builder looks similar to Appsmith. Examined the DOM, and it was Appsmith code under the hood.
I’m new to the FOSS world and it was quite interesting to see someone use our project to compete with us.
I’m new to the FOSS world and it was quite interesting to see someone use our project to compete with us.
(Creator of Superblocks here)
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.
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.
Thanks for confirming.
What is the license you are using?
If your intention is not to allow this, you could switch to AGPL.
If your intention is not to allow this, you could switch to AGPL.
We use the Apache 2.0 license and we don’t intend to change it. AGPL would restrict adoption. We have a few large companies that maintain Appsmith forks customised for their needs. A couple of them have made the product better.
Only thing that I’d like is an acknowledgement at this point. An engineer from Superblocks spent hours of my team’s time asking questions about the project on our Discord community. We were too dim to realise that the engineer wasn’t interested in contributing but competing. It’s all perfectly legal, but definitely left a poor taste once we found the product.
[Disclaimer: my company is using Superblocks and have been paying for it for about a year]
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.
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.
As a developer, the other concerns that I always want to be addressed around RPA / UI based tools are (1) how do I solve my problem when it outgrows the bounds of the product, yeah, you kinda have custom code I can enter via the webpage, but... (2) why do I have to use & learn your UI, let me use my normal tools
Are you looking for specifically to write code in say your own IDE like VSCode and we build a VScode extension?
I use nvim, but yea, that is the point. Meet your users where they are, which is code for developers, not drag-n-drop, which is for non-developers. Pick your poison :]
Just to be clear, porting a drag-n-drop interface to VS Code is not meeting developers where they are.
Just to be clear, porting a drag-n-drop interface to VS Code is not meeting developers where they are.
(Disclaimer: I’m an engineer at Superblocks)
Interesting point. Personal opinion here - I do not think that drag and drop is only for non-developers. A great example of this is the gaming industry in Unity/Unreal engine. These tools are effectively low-code but also incorporate drag and drop to allow developers to build whatever they can imagine but faster. Drag and drop should be an extension to the developer’s arsenal, not be the only way a developer can interact with the system.
Interesting point. Personal opinion here - I do not think that drag and drop is only for non-developers. A great example of this is the gaming industry in Unity/Unreal engine. These tools are effectively low-code but also incorporate drag and drop to allow developers to build whatever they can imagine but faster. Drag and drop should be an extension to the developer’s arsenal, not be the only way a developer can interact with the system.
I agree 100%, I want a drag-n-drop* but every single one has not met the expectations.
* what I want now is a little more and a product I plan to move from prototype to production soon (tm)
As I said in a peer comment, I get the game engine analogy, it's close, but there are enough differences that it doesn't carry enough weight to make it a point of justification. They've also had over a decade plus to develop and get lots of complaints. But note, there are 2-4 options in the game dev space, because it is so hard to build a compelling experience. Low code. / drag-n-drop is littered with shitty products and race to the bottom competitors. Also, my statements can generalize to DnD based solutions for more than frontend, to things like node red, iffft, zapier et al
Since Excel is on the front of HN, I'm reminded that Excel is the OG and most successful low code product in history
* what I want now is a little more and a product I plan to move from prototype to production soon (tm)
As I said in a peer comment, I get the game engine analogy, it's close, but there are enough differences that it doesn't carry enough weight to make it a point of justification. They've also had over a decade plus to develop and get lots of complaints. But note, there are 2-4 options in the game dev space, because it is so hard to build a compelling experience. Low code. / drag-n-drop is littered with shitty products and race to the bottom competitors. Also, my statements can generalize to DnD based solutions for more than frontend, to things like node red, iffft, zapier et al
Since Excel is on the front of HN, I'm reminded that Excel is the OG and most successful low code product in history
It's a great point, one interesting thing we've found is that backend developers are welcoming of using a drag and drop frontend builder, as long as it is extensible with code. For them using React, HTML, CSS is painful especially for an internal tool where the speed of getting their tool shipped is paramount.
Do you have analytics that back that up, or just statements and surveys?
As a backend focused dev who's very interested in low code, I've tried them all and they fall short after the honeymoon. Most recently Plasmic.app, had (has) great promise once their product matures. They nailed the developer facing workflow. The problem is twofold, (1) that the UI is big, slow, and buggy (2) the code that comes out the other side is super heavy. A blank component added 50% to my bytes shipped.
The hard question to answer is what does that interaction point look like? Why is the backend dev even tasked with doing the frontend?
You'll face a point where you will have to decide who your paid product is for, and every drag-n-drop for developers has pivoted to non-developers, because getting something that most developers actually love has proved impossible to date.
As a backend focused dev who's very interested in low code, I've tried them all and they fall short after the honeymoon. Most recently Plasmic.app, had (has) great promise once their product matures. They nailed the developer facing workflow. The problem is twofold, (1) that the UI is big, slow, and buggy (2) the code that comes out the other side is super heavy. A blank component added 50% to my bytes shipped.
The hard question to answer is what does that interaction point look like? Why is the backend dev even tasked with doing the frontend?
You'll face a point where you will have to decide who your paid product is for, and every drag-n-drop for developers has pivoted to non-developers, because getting something that most developers actually love has proved impossible to date.
Not from statements and surveys, but from paying customers :)
We think our market area is wildly similar to the early days of gaming engines, echoing what pbardea commented earlier. We are providing the game-engine or the "tool-engine" if you will.
The reason backend developers are often tasked with building frontends on internal tools is because the frontend developers are often allocated fully to the core revenue-generating customer facing product.
As of today, we don't solve every use case pure code can. But over time we think there is a path to becoming the default and standard for this category of software, especially if we can nail the programmability aspect to win over developers.
We think our market area is wildly similar to the early days of gaming engines, echoing what pbardea commented earlier. We are providing the game-engine or the "tool-engine" if you will.
The reason backend developers are often tasked with building frontends on internal tools is because the frontend developers are often allocated fully to the core revenue-generating customer facing product.
As of today, we don't solve every use case pure code can. But over time we think there is a path to becoming the default and standard for this category of software, especially if we can nail the programmability aspect to win over developers.
There will be no default or standard in low code / drag n drop. It's a market that has been around a long time, very crowded, largely segmented, and a tough space to compete in.
I get the game engine analogy, used it myself, but it's a little apples and oranges. Very different personas, if you only have one persona for developers or even backend devs, you haven't narrowed down enough yet.
I get the game engine analogy, used it myself, but it's a little apples and oranges. Very different personas, if you only have one persona for developers or even backend devs, you haven't narrowed down enough yet.
Hi! Thanks for the feedback on Plasmic.
Re: "super heavy" output: A blank component should result in one corresponding div. Maybe you're weighing the API client library? You can codegen pure React modules if you don't want the loader library itself.
If you have any specific feedback on the UI, would love to listen. Thank you!
Re: "super heavy" output: A blank component should result in one corresponding div. Maybe you're weighing the API client library? You can codegen pure React modules if you don't want the loader library itself.
If you have any specific feedback on the UI, would love to listen. Thank you!
The whole thing is recorded, I posted a link to twitch in slack.
An unhydrated card like the testimonial example was 28k via code gen.
I put tons of feedback in that video, if your teams are not watching it, you are missing out immensely
Despite not pulling a lot of punches in my stream, I still think Plasmic is closest of all I have tried to a developer friendly, maybe lovable in time, product
An unhydrated card like the testimonial example was 28k via code gen.
I put tons of feedback in that video, if your teams are not watching it, you are missing out immensely
Despite not pulling a lot of punches in my stream, I still think Plasmic is closest of all I have tried to a developer friendly, maybe lovable in time, product
I never watch videos (I can't skim read a video and they usually involve audio and that's usually inconvenient).
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.
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.
(One of the developers of Superblocks here)
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!
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!
Yep. That's exactly the thing I would have liked to have seen near the top.
To my mind, an amalgam of the gifs on that quickstart should be on your home page as the hero image.
To my mind, an amalgam of the gifs on that quickstart should be on your home page as the hero image.
Congrats! Seems like a Retool competitor but focused more on developers? I'm not sure if that's the direction I would go since developers already have pretty good tooling for their level of expertise, IMO.
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.
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.
Because Superblocks is quite broad in nature we end up being compared to a wide variety of tools but we at the same time integrate with them.
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.
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.
I have used airplane for scheduled jobs, I like their configuration/definition file driven development flow. I am not a fan of writting code in browser.
Airplane.dev founder here - glad to hear you like our approach! Many low-code/no-code tools miss the mark, in my opinion, by creating a walled garden / silo where you build stuff, which makes it hard to version control, leads to vendor lock-in, etc. Our approach has always been to allow users to write normal code that they store in their own repository.
Excited to see where Superblocks goes and whether it embraces that approach in the future.
Excited to see where Superblocks goes and whether it embraces that approach in the future.
Hi, one of the creators of Superblocks here. We think airplane is a great product and want to enable developers to choose their favorite development flow. We're working on a gitops feature that will allow you to export Superblocks app definitions into project files and manage it just like any git repo.
Super cool. It's likely in the works but it would be cool to have more recipes / mini templates to start with on the application builder. E.g. a list of most active users or something similarly generic to help me get to something real faster. Also the ability to add an integration / connect postgres from the 'new api' prompt rather than having to go back to the dashboard first
This is a really good idea and something that is on our roadmap to add templates to accelerate tooling development. We're learning about the most common use cases and going to build templates to shortcut getting started. The other thing we've discussed is upon connecting an integration (ex. Postgres) automatically giving you a postgres admin app, similar to what you get with a Django admin for example.
Is that what what you're referring to?
good usability feedback on the New API part of the UI, we will address this!
Is that what what you're referring to?
good usability feedback on the New API part of the UI, we will address this!
Yeah pretty much, help me get to a data connected state as fast as possible so I have an app / view to share with someone. It's likely an app has a user's table with created ts, help me generate a chart of signups over last 30 days or something rather than having me manually create an app, drag in a chart, nav about to connect pg and then write the basic SQL. Then once I have a working base I can explore from there
A Django admin replacement would be wonderful and something I'd absolutely love to build with Superblocks!
There are some very good features of Django Admin we can learn from like their onboarding - the major reason some users have replaced Django Admin with Superblocks is that Superblocks works with your db but also internal/external APIS pretty easily, plus there's a Workflow and Cron Job aspect to the platform.
The reason others have chosen to stay with Django admin and not move to Superblocks is they spent a ton of time investing in it (and it works quite well), the switching cost ends up being high.
The reason others have chosen to stay with Django admin and not move to Superblocks is they spent a ton of time investing in it (and it works quite well), the switching cost ends up being high.
What’s the lock-in? As in - when we’ve built a UI/app is it locked into a subscription?
What happens if you go out of business or we stop subscribing?
What happens if you go out of business or we stop subscribing?
(Superblocks creator here)
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?
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?
I like the UI integration. Feels similar in purpose to UIPath or other robotic process automation systems, but I don't have enough experience to compare.
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...
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...
(One of the developers of Superblocks here)
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!
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!
How does this compare to Retool (https://retool.com)? We use Retool at my company and like it; this seems like it is similar, but targets non-developers and is less mature (e.g. in the quality of the components)?
Looks like it has tons of potential, but from watching your demo, developing steps using a bunch of form fields is going to be very tedious, especially when you're trying to test/debug things and have to flip between screens constantly.
Hi, one of the creators of Superblocks here. Most building blocks in Superblocks are fully extensible with code, and we're building much better debugging capabilities in the platform. The form based configuration is easier to work with for simple use cases, for more complex use case, you can extend Superblocks with your own business logic in code. We're also building a gitops feature where we allow users to manage Superblocks apps and workflows in source files just like any git project.
Congrats on the announcement Superblocks team.
I am the cofounder of Budibase - an open source alternative to Superblocks.
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.
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.
Congrats on the launch Brad and Ran and team! We've been an early customer of Superblocks for a long time and have been thoroughly impressed with the team and product.
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.
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? Btw your demo is really slow on my phone.
One of the developers that built Superblocks here:
> 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.
> 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.
Interesting. This is kind of like Camunda without the BPMN baggage and a full blown IDE that integrates all the frontend/UI aspects with the backend workflow stuff. With Camunda, you have to build your own frontend past the auto-generated task forms. It’d also be interesting to see what a rule engine would look like in Superblocks.
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.)
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.)
Looks good but I don't think I would try any tool unless it is open source as a developer.
Note that Our agent (which is what executes code) is on GitHub here and source available: https://github.com/superblocksteam/agent
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?
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?
The code snippet in this [0] example from the index page (top) looks to have an f-string issue:
return [
[0] https://assets-global.website-files.com/627d359d0e0aa265b781...
E: Fix formatting (TIL HN doesn't support code blocks)
return [
{
"message": "{t.name} is due for {t.due_days} days",
"assignee": t.assignee,
}
for t in tickets
[0] https://assets-global.website-files.com/627d359d0e0aa265b781...
E: Fix formatting (TIL HN doesn't support code blocks)
Good catch, we're fixing this right now!
The problem with all these no-code/low-code tools is that they are not Turing complete. Wherever you need to do something custom, you have to write code.
This matches exactly how we saw the market before we built Superblocks - which is why we never refer to Superblocks as low-code/no-code solution, but rather a programmable developer tool.
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:
https://docs.superblocks.com/components/custom-components
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:
https://docs.superblocks.com/components/custom-components
Question regarding:
> 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?
> 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?
Yep - it's the latter! You can self-host an instance of the OPA and configure your organization to point to that instance rather than the cloud hosted one. Our docs have a bit more detail: https://docs.superblocks.com/on-premise-agent/deployment
Super interesting. Is the idea that this is like Retool, but a little more dummy'd down (in a good way) and has cron/workflow capabilities?
We're a broader approach to building different types of internal tools (UI, workflows, Cron).
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.
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.
Looks great. Might be simplifying too much but is it basically like Retool + cron jobs? Super interesting if that's the case :)
Hi, creator of Superblocks here. We are 100% focused on developers and our goal is to make the onboarding experience seamless. We've seen many of our customers consolidate different tools so they can manage dashboards, workflows (APIs), cron jobs, all in one place. We also have a different architecture than Retool where there is significantly lower overhead for the customer because we offer a lightweight agent rather than a fully on-prem installation. Happy to dive into more details with you!
I think the python functioning is super useful for my application on superblock.
but it only provides basic functionalities.
are you guys going to make it more powerful like importing project from my own codebase/github repo. So I can use a lot of my own code components, and the abilities to install additional packages.
We are another of Superblocks' early customers, and we've found it really useful for creating internal tools quickly. We still prefer to write some of our more heavyweight tools in React to leverage component reuse, etc, but we like this for lightweight tools that don't have a lot of complex frontend logic.
(Superblocks developer here)
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?
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?
What sort of company size would find this useful? I can already see several pushbacks against this type of tool.
A startup or mid sized company with operational/management/admin requirements but no dedicated internal tools team and/or limited engineering resources.
We've seen a mix of small startups building their first admin tool, for example to replace a Django Admin. We've also seen larger enterprises with 1000+ operations people building financial services tooling to support credit card management or a large salesforce doing on the fly pricing of their product based on data from Snowflake. So it ranges, what we do see if most medium and large companies want to use our source available agent to keep their customer data in their VPC
[deleted]
This could be really useful in healthtech, is it HIPAA compliant by any chance?
We aren't yet HIPAA compliant (yet), we recently got SOC2 compliance working with a compliance vendor to do more certifications. One thing is that with our on-prem agent your customer data never leaves your VPC.
So when you use the on-prem agent, does it rewrite all the backend endpoints to point at the agent, and continue serving the frontend externally?
Looks awesome but how do you handle version control? Also, can permissions be set on who is able to modify vs. view/run a job?
Since we focused on developers we had to do both those things early as users didn't want to adopt without it. In terms of version control, we have a native version control that allows you to mark a deploy comment rollback to any prior version of an app, workflow or job.
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!
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!
Awesome. Looks like a great way to save redundant dev hours creating internal tools
This looks awesome for support teams building their internal tools!
Very interesting! Looks easy to create some internal admin tool.
As someone who used to have to hack internal tools, love that superblocks is making this easier!
yes! more options to save me from powerapps. looks good so far.
Super exciting. What industries or applications are you guys tackling first? Congrats!
We've seen the most pull from more operations-heavy businesses like Fintech (building KYC, AML, Fraud, Credit Card Admin tools), Insurance (claims management and support admins), E-commerce (Order Management, Supply chain). Which industry are you in?
Seems like a cottage recipe market/consultancy for small non-tech business could be a professional services like option (or for others to have a small consultancy coming into non-tech businesses and selling setting this up, templating, recipes, whatever for companies.
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.
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.
interesting point. It would be interesting that at scale these platforms look more like salesforce in that there are viable businesses / consultancies built around it, time will tell!
Nicely done, now I dont need to write custom tooling for internal applications.
Given the comments I'm used to seeing in general in HN, the over excited tone of the comments in this post makes me wonder how truthful all the praising is, or if they are related to the company in any way. Maybe HN is actually full of people who build internal tools and find this honestly awesome and a game changer.
I am a coward so I didn't want to be the first one to say it, but so many of these comments are so suspicious. The really positive ones seem to have like 1-2 karma.
Eh I don't see too many like that and even if some customers do show up to give meaningful testimony I think that's fine and useful. The few that are meaningless got voted down and will be dead soon.
To be fair, you are right, now, because when I first opened the discussion there was only 1 critic comment and the rest was overly enthusiastic praise. It really stood out from the usual tone of the discussions.
It was more concentrated when the post had fewer comments. HN regulars are now more of the comments.
Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email [email protected] and we'll look at the data.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It definitely seems like they told / scheduled this with their users. There are definite ones based on their comments.
tl;dr, they did not read the FAQ and broke the HN rule are thinking of
tl;dr, they did not read the FAQ and broke the HN rule are thinking of
I didn't check every user but I did find a couple that had not posted anything in years until now. Makes you wonder.
[deleted]
I have been actively following this space. I think there is a huge fallacy in a tool like this. At surface most of the developers love the idea, you often get feedback that people would use it but time comes people just not integrate their service with a platform like this. You have to build huge amount of trust either by raising from popular VC, Angel's, blogpost by reputed dev advocates, socialproofing. For a general purpose framework it is generally an uphill battle. Having said that, there has been outcomes in past like rundeck's acquisition by pagerduty. One thing I noticed that platform who have built some features that bound them to certain usecases done really well. Platform with a horizontal is a very long road than a platform with certain purpose, it also makes it easy to sell. Just some thoughts.
[deleted]
Cool product, nice features, too important to rely on such a young company.
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.
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.
[deleted]
beautiful. Looks really great!!
[deleted](1)
Looks awesome, internal tools are usually such a pain to build and maintain (and tough to prioritize relative to customer-facing features). Excited to see this!
Gamechanging. Built an internal admin tool with Superblocks in just a few minutes - definitely saved me hours of time and let me focus on building my core product. Congrats on building an awesome product already.
We are glad to be one of Superblock's early customers to build some of our internal tools and are super happy about it. Congrats on your official launch.
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-...