(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 help@superblocks.com 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
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:
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.
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 help@superblocks.com 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...