xyzzyrz
Joined 17 years ago
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Comment · 2 years ago
We also have this page that goes into some more detail: https://www.plasmic.app/vs-builder-io
Comment · 2 years ago
Just some of the differences: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38701406
And yes you can connect directly a database - critically, Plasmic lets you define backend operations that work with auth: https://docs.plasmic.app/learn/integrations/#security
Comment · 2 years ago
There's a vibrant industry of similar tools - but lots of differences and room to innovate!
Just a few of the differences: Plasmic....
- Is not specific to MUI
- Supports actual design control (beyond theming)
- Supports defining reusable components in the editor, with slots/props/variants
- Is suitable for websites and applications where page speed matters (static/SSR pre-rendering and data fetching, image optimization, etc.)
- Has a more structured layout system
- Is highly configurable UI for different personas - e.g. non-developers on the team
- Has cross-project imports / reusable libraries
- Has Figma import
- More...
Comment · 2 years ago
Fixed, thanks!
Comment · 2 years ago
We still have work to do to make self hosting (much) easier, but yes, that's the plan!
Comment · 2 years ago
I talk about the "why" a bit above, but we've talked about how to open source it internally since almost its inception, but there's work involved in open sourcing that we just had to prioritize like any other work item, as well as concerns around whether we were ready to support it (for instance, in light of rapidly changing code and data).
Comment · 2 years ago
You can think of it like that - GrapesJS ultimately outputs HTML that exists in its own universe, whereas Plasmic focuses more on integrating with existing codebases, where you might want to use your React components, render in your React context, etc.
Comment · 2 years ago
I think another thing interesting about Plasmic is that it is a bit ambitious in trying to combine some seemingly disparate genres:
- Webflow, Wordpress and other page builders
- Retool and other tool builders
- Glide and no-code app builders
- Contentful and other CMSes
Today these are different tools to specialize in, but the line between, say, a website and an application is blurry (consider an ecommerce storefront with user logins, or a customer portal). With the right foundations, we think these can be unified—Plasmic’s UI can adapt to different levels of control for different personas/tasks.
So a newer use case is that you can use it to build applications as well as websites, for both developers and non-developers. This is the more experimental side of the project, beyond the content management use case.
Comment · 2 years ago
Excited to see this posted here! I think probably because we announced it going open source today.
I think the GitHub page is probably a bit clearer than our website right now:
https://github.com/plasmicapp/plasmic
Basically, it's a visual page builder that plugs into your own Next.js/Remix/React/etc. codebase. Your marketing/content/design team can then build and publish pages without filing tickets on eng. This (content management) is the main use case.
The most interesting aspect is that editors can drag and drop React components from your own codebase as building blocks. This is very powerful, esp. with e.g. data fetching React components.
Why open source? Because we love the tool. Plasmic has been in production deployment at companies big and small. But we think it can grow far beyond ourselves as an open source project. We’d love to see a broader community take it in unexplored directions. Community users have even started using it to build emails with React.Email and mobile screens in React Native.
Would love to hear folks' questions and feedback!
Comment · 2 years ago
Thanks for the feedback, we're still iterating on the homepage and didn't expect to get posted here yet!
Our repo https://github.com/plasmicapp/plasmic might be a bit more concrete.
It's a visual page builder that integrates with React codebases. Content management is our biggest use case - i.e., dev team integrates with Plasmic, and then marketing/content/design teams can create landing pages on the marketing site.
(A newer use case is building applications as well, hence some of the comparisons with Retool etc. There's actually quite a bit of overlap between these use cases, esp. when considering external-facing "customer portal"-style applications.)
Comment · 4 years ago
For anyone else looking for a link to Herb Sutter's accompanying talk at cppcon: