You may come across a variety of tools to help you quickly build apps for your business.
However, most of the trusted options are often proprietary products. So, you will be locked into their platform without knowing enough about what you utilize to build the apps.
An open-source solution should be a perfect replacement, giving you peace of mind, and confidence about your critical business apps.
Budibase is one such impressive solution.
Budibase: Open-Source Low-Code Platform to Make Things Easy
Budibase is an increasingly popular open-source low-code platform that can help you build apps for your business.
You can create apps from scratch or use existing templates to quickly build forms, an agency-client portal, car rental admin panel, a portal for accountants, job application tracker, and many more.
While it does make things easy without you needing the necessary programming skills, it also offers control to let you customize the apps to an extent.
It supports a range of data sources: MySQL, Rest API, OracleDB, MongoDB, Google Sheets, and others.
You can choose to self-host it and deploy the applications on your server, or utilize Budibase’s cloud hosting offering.
Features of Budibase
Budibase offers most of the essential features. Let me highlight the important ones here:
- Supports external data sources including MongoDB, MySQL, etc.
- Rest API to pull data.
- Ability to use built-in database for apps or upload a CSV to import data.
- Variety of data types and functionality including attachments, relationships, formulas, and more.
- API integration platform to integrate different APIs and help you build internal apps, forms, and more easily.
- Ability to generate auto-screens using an internal table
- Build single page applications
- Auto-generated CRUD (Create, Read, Update, and Delete) screens
- Private and public applications
- Customize the theme of your app in a few clicks.
- Easy to implement a dark mode theme for your app
- A feature-rich form builder to satisfy a wide range of requirements
- Webhook support
- Third-party integration with Zapier, and more.
- Flexible automation options based on particular triggers.
- Ability to add JavaScript to your automations.
- Self-host option for users with their own infrastructure.
- Free Single Sign-On for authentication/admin.
- User management options to assign team to different apps
- SMTP email support.
- Email templates to match your brand and style.
- OAuth log in support. Limited to Google as of now.
- Charts, Tables, and Cards to present data elegantly.
Overall, there is a lot more to explore once you sign in to the service and check out its offerings.
In my brief usage, I found the user interface comfortable and easy to use. To give you additional insights, I have shared more about using Budibase below.
Using Budibase to Build an App Quickly
The user experience is the primary factor when using such services.
Budibase does not disappoint you in this regard. You get an excellent user experience when you start using Budibase.
As far as I’ve used open-source platforms, the user experience is not always the strong point. But, in this case, it’s the user experience that makes the tool easy to use.
You can quickly get started building an app, adding your sources, and start designing it in a few clicks.
You are welcome to choose the internal database or opt for an external source. The platform lets you edit/create/import data as required.
And, in a few clicks (depending on the scale of your application), you can get started designing the screens and tweaking the layout.
It is entirely a visual editor, so you get what you see. Add containers, section, forms, cards, charts, and many other elements to the layout.
Tweaking the theme is a breeze. So, you can match your brand style/accent or just go creative as per your requirements.
You can edit the data seamlessly, create new data fields, and enable search indexes for the data as well.
Not to forget, you also get all the automation options to integrate with other services, respond to triggers using webhook, corn jobs, or an app action. These are some of the most important things to build one of the most effective applications for your users.
Here’s how it looks when I built a sample application tracking system using Budibase:
Of course, you can choose to publish the app on your server or use Budibase’s cloud offering.
Final Thoughts
Budibase is an incredibly useful low-code platform that should help individuals and businesses quickly build a variety of applications. You should explore more about it on its official website and GitHub page.
It eliminates the need to hire an expert to build applications for a wide range of use-cases. And, as an open-source platform that you can self-host, it will let you scale up and provide complete control on building apps easily without paying a premium.
You can also opt for its enterprise offering, with premium support and specially tailored service, if the need arises.
