(Cofounder of Superblocks, an Airplane alternative)
Congrats to the Airplane team for joining forces with Airtable, both teams and products are stellar and know people on both sides.
Airplane has been a thought-leader in the code-first approach to internal tools and brought to market a compelling DevX around infinitely extensible internal tools – this inspired our custom components [0]
For any customers looking to make a switch, the Superblocks team is ready to help, you can email us directly at [email protected] or use live chat on our website and our Technical Support Engineering team would be happy to lend a hand.
Superblocks has the same concepts as Airplane: workflows, scheduled jobs and views, though our views are achieved through drag-and-drop. Similar to Airplane we have an option to deploy a hybrid on-prem agent [1] to ensure your data never leaves your VPC, though our agent uses bring-your-own-key (BYOK) to sign application definitions. Customers never have to run stateful services on-prem, schedule downtime or handle painful upgrades.
Some of the things developers love about Superblocks beyond the DevX and agent architecture are control flow [2] and streaming [3] via Kafka, Kinesis, OpenAI and LLMs.
For developers who want to take full ownership of what they build, we have a vision around “export to code”, enabling you to build in Superblocks and run on your servers. It’s on our roadmap and something developers are excited about.
Brad here, one of the cofounders of Superblocks! Last week we launched on Hacker News and we’re incredibly thankful for all of the constructive feedback and excitement we received: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32344671
We heard you loud and clear, and are addressing the pain of not enough templates, vendor lock in risk, open source preferences, custom UI components, etc. We wrote about how we plan to address it here: https://www.superblocks.com/blog/learnings-from-hitting-1-on...
As a reminder, Superblocks is 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.
Today with the fundraise we’re looking for even more critical feedback to determine where we should take the product next
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!
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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
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?
Congrats to the Airplane team for joining forces with Airtable, both teams and products are stellar and know people on both sides.
Airplane has been a thought-leader in the code-first approach to internal tools and brought to market a compelling DevX around infinitely extensible internal tools – this inspired our custom components [0]
For any customers looking to make a switch, the Superblocks team is ready to help, you can email us directly at [email protected] or use live chat on our website and our Technical Support Engineering team would be happy to lend a hand.
Superblocks has the same concepts as Airplane: workflows, scheduled jobs and views, though our views are achieved through drag-and-drop. Similar to Airplane we have an option to deploy a hybrid on-prem agent [1] to ensure your data never leaves your VPC, though our agent uses bring-your-own-key (BYOK) to sign application definitions. Customers never have to run stateful services on-prem, schedule downtime or handle painful upgrades.
Some of the things developers love about Superblocks beyond the DevX and agent architecture are control flow [2] and streaming [3] via Kafka, Kinesis, OpenAI and LLMs.
For developers who want to take full ownership of what they build, we have a vision around “export to code”, enabling you to build in Superblocks and run on your servers. It’s on our roadmap and something developers are excited about.
[0] https://www.superblocks.com/blog/introducing-custom-componen...
[1] https://www.superblocks.com/blog/superblocks-on-prem-agent
[2] https://www.superblocks.com/blog/introducing-control-blocks-...
[3] https://www.superblocks.com/blog/introducing-real-time-strea...