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A comment on Show HN: ToolJet 2.0 – Open-source alternative to Power Apps and Retool.

Re:Show HN: ToolJet 2.0 – Open-source alternative to Power A... by navaneethpk on Tuesday January 10, 2023 @06:33AM (#34323257)
Hi HN,

Founder here, ToolJet’s story began when I launched beta version of ToolJet in June 2021 on HackerNews ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27421408](https://news....). It was very overwhelming to see the repository getting more than a thousand GitHub stars within less than 8 hours of launch. Since then we’ve grown into 16,000 stars and 300 contributors on GitHub. 1000s of teams are now using ToolJet to build and maintain their internal tools.

Today, we are excited to launch ToolJet 2.0.

We believe that any piece of software that has access to sensitive data of companies/people should be open-source and hosted on premises. Along with a strong focus on data privacy, we’ve also made sure that ToolJet as a platform is extremely flexible.

What is ToolJet?

ToolJet is an *open-source low-code framework* to build and deploy internal tools quickly. Those who already understands the low-code landscape, ToolJet is an open-source alternative to Microsoft Power Apps and Retool. ToolJet has integrations with data sources, such as databases (like PostgreSQL, MongoDB, MS SQL Server, SnowFlake, etc), API endpoints (with support for OAuth2 authorization), external services ( Airtable, Stripe, Slack, Google Sheets, Notion, etc) and even cloud storage services ( S3, GCS, Minio ).

What’s new?

- Redesigned every screen with a heavy focus on user experience. - Added in-built no-code database. This feature is built on top of PostgreSQL so that the self-hosted users can take advantage of capabilities of SQL as well. - Support for multi-page applications. - Realtime multiplayer editing so that changes from one user will not override the changes from another user. - Support for using Python ( along with already supported JavaScript ). You can use Python even for interacting with UI components. - Every installation of ToolJet can now have multiple workspaces. Each workspace can have their own SSO config and users. - ToolJet now has more than 50 data source integrations. You can also build custom connectors for ToolJet using our Plugin Development Kit ( [https://www.npmjs.com/package/@tooljet/cli](https://www.npmj... ). - We added a bunch of new UI components. Even complicated ones like Calendar and Kanban board. You can also import your own React components and use them within ToolJet apps. - ToolJet is now available in 8 languages including Spanish, Italian, German, French & Russian. - More test coverage using Cypress. We now have dedicated team members for improving test coverage.

We are still very early in our journey and there is a lot more to build. Constant feedback from the open-source community is the reason why we are here, any feedback is appreciated and happy to answer any questions.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Show HN: ToolJet 2.0 – Open-source alternative to Power A... by thedangler on Tuesday January 10, 2023 @04:53PM (#34332093)
Anyway you can enlighten me on how to distinguish between Users to build the apps and users that will use the apps? I got lost in the documentation. I'm assuming there are different kind of users. Users that build the apps and outside users that register to use the app, if publicly facing.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Show HN: ToolJet 2.0 – Open-source alternative to Power A... by bhive2 on Tuesday January 10, 2023 @10:04PM (#34334559)
ToolJet focuses only on internal tools, so it doesn't have a way to let users signup from a public page. Internal users who doesn't need app building permissions cab be added to a user group and the group can be given "vie only" permission to specific apps.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Show HN: ToolJet 2.0 – Open-source alternative to Power A... by navaneethpk on Wednesday January 11, 2023 @01:20PM (#34342217)
You can create user groups and give permissions to specific apps. Permissions are either "view" or "edit". If given "view" permission, the user will not be able to make changes to the application.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Show HN: ToolJet 2.0 – Open-source alternative to Power A... by farseer on Wednesday January 11, 2023 @04:57AM (#34336825)
The free tier has no "user groups & roles". Practically what does that mean?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Show HN: ToolJet 2.0 – Open-source alternative to Power A... by navaneethpk on Wednesday January 11, 2023 @01:22PM (#34342247)
Sorry, looks like a mistake. What free tier misses is only the granular access control. Fixing it asap.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Show HN: ToolJet 2.0 – Open-source alternative to Power A... by darkteflon on Wednesday January 11, 2023 @01:26PM (#34342310)
Congratulations on the 2.0 launch! This looks interesting. We’re considering something like this internally. Could you talk a bit about the differences - if any - between the self-hosted version and the hosted version, and what the plan is with respect to feature parity going forward?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Show HN: ToolJet 2.0 – Open-source alternative to Power A... by navaneethpk on Wednesday January 11, 2023 @01:51PM (#34342716)
The differences are listed out here: https://www.tooljet.com/pricing. Cloud deployment are usually a few days delayed, features are very similar.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Show HN: ToolJet 2.0 – Open-source alternative to Power A... by pritambaral on Wednesday January 11, 2023 @01:41PM (#34342549)
One thing I find missing in every such platform (except Retool) is a user editable code library. It's one thing to be able run code in query transformation and widgets, another thing to be able to organise common code patterns into functions and use them in multiple query transforms and widgets. Once an app grows large enough, this becomes really important. Otherwise, there's always a build-up of copied and pasted code that's a nightmare to update (or even use) later.

The best I could find was just this: "ToolJet allows you to internally utilize the Moment, Lodash, and Axios libraries". But what if that's not enough? What if I need another library to use? I know, I can add it to a fork I self-host, but that's still not "user editable".

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Show HN: ToolJet 2.0 – Open-source alternative to Power A... by navaneethpk on Wednesday January 11, 2023 @02:00PM (#34342859)
We are working on this actively. npm packages and Python packages from Micropip will be supported soon.

Organising queries: yes, this is also on our roadmap but yet to prioritise. Thanks for the detailed feedback.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Show HN: ToolJet 2.0 – Open-source alternative to Power A... by grantc on Wednesday January 11, 2023 @02:34PM (#34343368)
Curious why AGPL was the optimal license choice? As a license, it will preclude a number of the same companies that would want to run it on-premise for data security reasons. (Some large companies that might have the same need to run on-prem or private cloud, also blanket won't approve GPL/AGPL licenses.)
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Show HN: ToolJet 2.0 – Open-source alternative to Power A... by navaneethpk on Wednesday January 11, 2023 @02:36PM (#34343387)
We've written about this choice on our blog in detail: https://blog.tooljet.com/changing-license-to-agpl/.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Show HN: ToolJet 2.0 – Open-source alternative to Power A... by TigerTeamX on Wednesday January 11, 2023 @08:13PM (#34347722)
Interesting.

Is it possible to run ToolJet on bare metal without too many problems?

And this might seem silly, but SQLite3 datasource integration could be pretty sweet :)

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Show HN: ToolJet 2.0 – Open-source alternative to Power A... by discordance on Thursday January 12, 2023 @12:47AM (#34349687)
docker run \

  --name tooljet \

  --user root \

  --restart unless-stopped \

  -p 3000:3000 \

  -v tooljet_data:/var/lib/postgresql/13/main \

  tooljet/try:latest
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Show HN: ToolJet 2.0 – Open-source alternative to Power A... by moonbas3 on Thursday January 12, 2023 @01:42AM (#34350009)
Did you add support for SSH Tunnel for data source connections (e.g. mysql)?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Show HN: ToolJet 2.0 – Open-source alternative to Power A... by navaneethpk on Thursday January 12, 2023 @03:06AM (#34350554)
Not yet, this is not in our immediate roadmap.
[ Parent | on HN ]