Views by Airplane

Developer-centric approach to quickly building internal UIsHi Product Hunt! 👋 Last year, we launched Airplane on Product Hunt and got an amazing response. A lot of our earliest users and advocates came from Product Hunt and have been hugely influential in shaping our product. We're back again today launching Airplane Views, which represents a huge change in what Airplane is capable of.

To recap how Airplane works at a high level: We're a developer platform for creating internal tools. You can take any SQL query, REST endpoint, or JS/Python script and quickly build lightweight apps that anyone can use (called "Tasks"). Examples are things like "delete a user," "issue a refund," "update an email address," etc. These are represented in Airplane with a simple web form that lets you trigger that operation. You can also join these tasks together to build multi-step workflows (called "Runbooks").

Today, we're launching Airplane Views: Views lets you build much more complicated, full-featured internal UIs on top of your Airplane tasks and runbooks. Our beta customers have used Views to build out admin panels, fintech fraud monitoring dashboards, content moderation UIs, metrics dashboards, and a lot more.

What makes Views unique: Many people use low-code/no-code drag-and-drop platforms to create these kinds of internal admin UIs, but Airplane is a code-based, developer platform:

1️⃣ Views are built in React and TypeScript/JavaScript. We offer a rich component library and state management system that makes building Views in Airplane far easier than doing so from scratch, even if you're not a React expert. 2️⃣ Our code-based approach means you can extend it however you want and version control the code in your own codebase. 3️⃣ Much less vendor lock-in than using a siloed platform (e.g. most of the low-code/no-code platforms out there).

✈️ Why use Airplane?

Thousands of free users and hundreds of paid customers use Airplane every day. Here are a few reasons why engineers love Airplane:

⏩ Build internal tools fast: engineers find Airplane fast to get started with. It's possible to solve a real-world use case within a few minutes of signing up. 💻 Flexible and extensible: you can build UIs, execute long-running scripts, scheduled jobs, multi-step workflows, and more. We're code-based so Airplane is infinitely extensible. 🔒 Security & organizational controls: granular permissions, RBAC, approval flows, audit logs built in. SOC 2 Type 2 compliant & self-hosting available. 🚀 Built for developers: everything in Airplane is expressed as Python, JS, SQL or other code, rather than a proprietary no-code framework.

👁 Why we built Views

Views represents the #1 feature request we've received over the past year. Customers have always found Airplane really easy to build out the key operational workflows within their company. The natural next step is to contextualize those workflows in a more coherent UI experience. If you have a large customer success/support/ops/sales/etc. team using Airplane, you want to have control over the ways in which they execute tasks and have data & context pass between tasks.

With a View, you can build a custom, opinionated dashboard, instead of just having a big list of executable tasks. Now, Airplane can serve as much more of a "one-stop shop" for all of a company's internal tooling needs.

We also built Views because we felt the existing ways of solving this internal UI problem weren't sufficient for every use case. Typically, teams have a couple of choices. They can build internal UIs from scratch, which is hugely time-consuming. Or, they can use a low-code/no-code app builder, which is faster, but doesn't allow your engineering team to extend it or version control it. We feel our code-first approach provides the best of both worlds to engineering teams who want to create internal tools.

We'd love to get your feedback! Airplane is free to sign up for and we have a generous free tier. If you have any thoughts, comments, questions, etc., please share them here!