Appsmith founder here. Congratulations on launching Budibase! I think it's a beautiful product.
Like MJshanks mentioned, there's some overlap in the usecases but there are significant differences in the platform direction. Budibase is more no-code, while Appsmith is geared towards developers aiming to build complex applications.
Appsmith is a more popular and mature tool with high quality documentation, video tutorials and stellar community support. The GitHub stars, issue list, and size of Discord community reflect this. [0]
1. According to users who've tried both, Appsmith's UX is simpler and enables building information dense UI. Appsmith has drag and drop to build absolute UI vs. relative positioning in Budibase. This does make Budibase apps more mobile responsive than Appsmith ones. Links to comments by other HN users [1] [2]
2. Appsmith is a more powerful platform with a high ceiling and low floor for entry. You can build simple apps quickly by auto-generating them. In Appsmith, you can write full-fledged JavaScript anywhere on the platform. This ensures all your business logic is always expressed correctly. You can map over data, merge data from different data sources, trigger conditional workflows, and conditionally control widget properties all with a few snippets of code.
Few more feature differences:
1. Appsmith has more UI components and support for 100+ charts
2. Built in git sync for version control
3. Real-time commenting and real-time editing(WIP) to enable collaboration between users
4. Appsmith has organizations/workspaces to help freelancers manage multiple projects
5. Error logger and linter to debug issues
Honestly at a more fundamental level, it's just great to see all the different products that have come out over the years that are trying to tackle the same problem space. When we started out initially, we didn't find any open-source alternatives (Budibase wasn't open source then), and so we embarked on building it. And now it's great to see so many different products, which gives users more choice and power over finding the platform that fits their needs best.
Like MJshanks mentioned, there's some overlap in the usecases but there are significant differences in the platform direction. Budibase is more no-code, while Appsmith is geared towards developers aiming to build complex applications.
Appsmith is a more popular and mature tool with high quality documentation, video tutorials and stellar community support. The GitHub stars, issue list, and size of Discord community reflect this. [0]
1. According to users who've tried both, Appsmith's UX is simpler and enables building information dense UI. Appsmith has drag and drop to build absolute UI vs. relative positioning in Budibase. This does make Budibase apps more mobile responsive than Appsmith ones. Links to comments by other HN users [1] [2]
2. Appsmith is a more powerful platform with a high ceiling and low floor for entry. You can build simple apps quickly by auto-generating them. In Appsmith, you can write full-fledged JavaScript anywhere on the platform. This ensures all your business logic is always expressed correctly. You can map over data, merge data from different data sources, trigger conditional workflows, and conditionally control widget properties all with a few snippets of code.
Few more feature differences:
1. Appsmith has more UI components and support for 100+ charts
2. Built in git sync for version control
3. Real-time commenting and real-time editing(WIP) to enable collaboration between users
4. Appsmith has organizations/workspaces to help freelancers manage multiple projects
5. Error logger and linter to debug issues
Honestly at a more fundamental level, it's just great to see all the different products that have come out over the years that are trying to tackle the same problem space. When we started out initially, we didn't find any open-source alternatives (Budibase wasn't open source then), and so we embarked on building it. And now it's great to see so many different products, which gives users more choice and power over finding the platform that fits their needs best.
[0] https://github.com/appsmithorg/appsmith
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28991242
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28304152