Show HN: No-code alternative to Retool, Appsmith, Internal, etc. (jetadmin.io)
Hi, founders!
We’ve actually launched quite some time ago, but (semi)pivoted a few times along the way.
Jet Admin is an app builder for creating internal tools, admin panels, dashboards, external portals, and so on without coding. You can connect to any backend, assemble a UI through the visual builder, and set up data binding, transformations, conditionals, etc. through the point-and-click interface.
If you need to, you can create custom HTTP, SQL queries, make data transformations with JS, and embed custom UI components.
We believe that product, data, operations teams should be able to build the very tools they use. And with HN being mostly the coder community, it’d be particularly interesting to hear your feedback/thoughts!
99 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 205 ms ] threadYou’re the one who is actually being combative
I guess Im wondering where large businesses fit in your target market. Not scrutiny, but I have personal interest in building tools for the enterprise space and wonder how startups approach that market. e.g.,
I dont see any such instructions on your website so that why i asked. Thanks for your time by the way, your product looks very good.
My standard questions as a coder for any tool like this are:
- how can I automate tests?
- how can I promote software up environments (using automation)?
- how can I use source control?
- how can I roll back a deployment?
Thanks!
In our low code platform (https://github.com/dashjoin/platform), you end up writing several JSONata (https://jsonata.org/) snippets for ETL, actions, and visualizations.
These can be tested using junit. All changes to the app can be managed and deployed via GitHub. You can check out our sample app:
GitHub: https://github.com/dashjoin/dashjoin-demo Live: https://demo.my.dashjoin.com/
What do you mean by automate tests? What exactly do you want to test?
On test automation I mean being able to write some fast tests that - say - test calculations and things like that, and medium speed tests that mock out the backend and play through the UI really fast, and slower end to end tests that play through the UI with a backend connected. And being able to do all that on Git commit push via CI is really helpful.
One of our customers in the public sector builds a Low Code app that performs automated plausibility checks on forms submitted by clients. These checks can be quite complex since they reflect legislation. In this case it is crucial that you can mock form input and validate the checks against expected results.
See https://sso.tax
It comes down to this: Don't assume companies are incompetent at proper dealings around employee access to products they use just because they're small. These things tend to be correlated, but it hurts small companies trying to deal with this correctly.
Edit - Let me phrase it like this: By locking away account management and security tools you're implicitly stating only large enterprises should care about security.
But I have found a couple companies that do a sort of "middle-ground" – SSO via SAML2 locked behind some "call us" enterprise BS, but Google Auth available to all.
MailGun does this, and so does Linear. Atlassian charges extra for SSO (via Atlassian Access) but it's just $30 a month or something, so seems totally reasonable even if extra.
This feels like a decent middle ground for smaller companies since it requires zero extra config.
In general, keeping track of >1 passwords means giving everyone a password manager and also means you can't integrate with the rest of your endpoint security stuff (like if you use Azure AD, it can check if you are coming from a corporate-owned device and give you different privileges or let you bypass 2FA). There are more creative ways to get people to move to a higher tier rather than locking a essential feature up there. As it is, I can pay for your highest plan or just use PowerApps/Google's equivalent.
Every company, regardless of size, needs to be secure.
Glad to see Github there, it is so egregious in its treatment of SSO. First, I would gladly pay additional for SSO integration in Github. But a 425% increase!! It's absurd and insane, and given how there are limitations in other security features I can require (I can't, for example, require hardware token authentication, only generic 2FA), this is borderline criminal.
Pay for additional, enterprise-specific features, I totally understand. But as this site you posted so eloquently describes, when the option is "have shittier security" unless you pay an obscene, bundled markup. This is an area where I do think regulation should be required, not so much at features or pricing but that additional security features shouldn't be permitted to be bundled in, or that SaaS product should have some amount of liability when they don't provide unbundled, table-stakes security features.
I wanted to request a Database connection through SSH since our databases are all behind a firewall and we access them through SSH tunnels.
Btw, SSH for databases is in our road map already
Good to hear about SSH being on your roadmap!
I suppose because you can build a CRM, a time tracker, analytics boards, and an admin dashboards for another service with one and the same tool.
Whether it is a good idea to do so, I don’t know.
Said that, I always prefer to buy or use open source solution when there is one, as long as they have a good API and an easy way to get data out of them.
However, what our customers build on Chartmat (also a no code tool) are custom solution: e.g. a therapist who has her own approach & wants to have an app for that approach that serves around 100 people. She could not use a custom SaaS because that would be following the approach of another "guru" in the industry. So there would not be a personal connection between her & her customers. Also for around 100 customers she would not want to hire a web dev agency to build a professional app. So that is kind of one of the use cases where a no code tool makes sense.
Another scenario is the following: let's say you are a small business (<5 employees) & you need a SaaS for time recording, billing, recording expenses, accounting, collecting customer information -> things that many small businesses like law firms need. Now you could have either 5-6 SaaS solutions for this or you could use one no code tool & process everything through one tool kind of like an ERP for small businesses and solo entrepreneurs. So you would end up paying 29$/month instead of 5 x 20$. Additionally you could easily consolidate all the data that matters in one single dashboard.
BUT for programmers? I.e. I don't care about "no code" (happy to code myself, in fact I think it's best to be able to customize things in code) but that takes care of things like backend-frontend sync (ideally push-based), permissions, etc. is fast (looking at you, AppSmith) and ideally also automates some tasks (e.g. auto-generating the GUI from SQL schema, similar to the original Django Admin)?
Just my wishlist...
Edit: another way of describing what I want: I would like to be able to edit the SQL database (or whatever data backend) via an interface that can be Excel-like (just a list of rows), custom (just a GUI of custom components) or a mix (e.g. rows with search, or grouped by some key, or multi-editing several rows, or displaying foreign key relationships ("parent" row and "child" rows)).
https://www.jigdev.com
Let me know if that could be of interest, and if yes, what the tool is missing.
>Auto-generating the GUI from SQL schema, similar to the original Django Admin
Thats exactly how Motor Admin works :)
It is code based, but everything else is taken care of including the UI which is auto-generated from your script parameters/signature in Python.
https://windmill.dev
Let me know what you think :)
But I would not call Directus a NoCode platform, it’s just a turn-key backend on top of a SQL database (also providing an admin interface).
I am myself a very satisfied user (for the last two months or so; Directus existed for a few years).
Have a look.
It actually exists since 2004, so it would be fair to say it's been more than a few years. But they recently switched from PHP to Node.
Other solutions (with varying degrees of similarity) include Strapi, PostgREST, Hasura...
https://budibase.com
You can quickly turn scripts, SQL, REST endpoints, etc into lightweight internal apps with UI, permissions, approval flows, audit logs, and more. It’s like AWS Lambda but geared towards human-executable tasks.
Similar to what you’re looking for, all the UI etc is autogenerated. It’s not a drag-and-drop / WYSIWYG app builder.
Send me a note at ravi@airplane.dev if you’d like to chat about it.
They have a GUI editor and their custom server runs a full python backend. One of the co-founder's has given a lot of talks about designing their system and I think it's pretty interesting.
https://widgetterminal.carrd.co/
My contact info is in my HN profile. Reach out if you want a demo.
throwing my hat into the ring. :) We're developing a language-independent "low-code" environment that's very much made for coders. Website is www.five.co
To give a few examples: 1. For your database, you can either import an SQL dump, or you can create the tables, relationships, etc. in point-and-click. We're using MySQL by default, but are database-agnostic. 2. You can write queries in SQL and use the result of these queries for things like charts, tables or dashboards. 3. You can write JavaScript, TypeScript and C# to create functions or processes used by your app. In the future, any language that can be compiled to WebAssembly can be used inside Five. We use Google's V8 engine for this. We also support libraries and plug-ins. 4. The GUI is provided by Five. All you've got to do is give it a theme in CSS or point-and-click. The GUI is responsive. We use Material UI. 5. Each app comes with three environments (dev, staging, production). All apps are containerized. We're using K8.
Our idea is to give developers a tool that let's them code as much as they want to, but provide "no-code" options for the more tedious tasks of development.
We don't have a trial on our website yet, but feel free to contact me and I can give you access to a training account.
The whole No code movement is backwards.
https://text2db.com/
Are these not suitable for building an external SaaS web-app? What exactly is the limitation that makes them not suitable for a world accessible SaaS app?
on the builder side, you can expose more confidential/internal data since you can safely assume the person and intended audience are only employees.
you can move faster if you assume away requirements that dont really matter in contexg.
You become reseller of the "low code tool" and now what are you providing to your customers that they could not do themselves?
There is also problem that anything goes wrong and you are not able to properly support your customers. With SaaS you have the code you have the team, you built the tool that you support and features are providing value.
I don't think you can do "multi tenancy" on "low code" platforms you would have to make separate account per customer. Which means you only repeat the work as you probably won't be able to build once and provide stuff for multiple companies.
GDPR where you are not side in processing might be nice as you ditch responisbility - but then your customers need to know who has their data. If they know what is stopping them from simply using "low code" on their own.
Mostly that they can't figure out how to price it. The tools typically charge a lot per user ($20+/month/user). If you make external users cheap, then customers will just enter internal users as external users.
Same question for customer apps. Does the pay plan scale with the #admin users (AKA the dev team building the apps) or with the #customers?
Most don't do this, or do it in such a brain-dead way that I am forced to use a branching model that is all wrong (eg a branch for each environment)
I'm a co-founder of the project, so forgive my shameless plug.
I use retool as a client-facing frontend for a niche data ETL product and I’m getting killed on their enterprise pricing.