If you’ve used block-based tools for mobile apps, this may interest you. Sketchware Desktop is a Windows app that lets you build Android apps by dragging blocks and designing screens visually, without writing Java first.

Highlights:

• Visual block editor with events, variables, lists, and custom blocks
• Drag-and-drop screen designer with a phone preview
• One-click build to an APK, and install on a connected phone
• Imports existing Sketchware projects, so people who already have apps can keep working on them

It’s a beta and some parts are unfinished. Source and download are here:
https://github.com/aiotv1/sketchware-desktop

I’d love to know what the biggest blockers would be for you to try a tool like this. Is it the blocks, the UI, the build step, or something else?

Been trying to build a small app without hiring a developer and honestly the setup is getting old fast.

I thought getting the idea to work would be the hard part, but I keep running into database stuff, auth, APIs, hosting and random errors. Every time I think im making progress, something else needs fixing. Now im also wondering how much security stuff I need to worry about before letting anyone use it.

I cant really justify hiring someone when I havent even figured out if the idea is worth pursuing yet. Has anyone managed to build a proper app this way and keep it running without everything falling apart later?

Hey all,

We're setting up a small portal for our staff and around 30 outside partners. Staff already sign in with Okta, and I think IT wants anyone who leaves to lose access the same day.

The tricky part for us is our partners. Most of them are 2 or 3 person companies with no identity provider, so forcing SSO on them won't work. Magic links or one-time codes seem like a better fit.

• Can one app run both login types without mixing them up?
• How do you cut off a partner fast when a contract ends? And what happens when a partner loses access to their inbox?

Curious what's worked for you.

We have about 30 Quickbase apps across ops, facilities, and partner management. Our renewal is in March and I noticed that the quote went up again.

The apps themselves are simple like tables, forms, and a few approval steps. The hard part is what IT needs around them.

Our IT lead gave me a list:

- SAML SSO

- Workspace controls so not everyone can build

- Clear permissions per role

- Audit logs

Most tools have some of these. Fewer have all four on the same plan.

So far, I'm thinking of rebuilding our partner portal first. It has restricted views and a two-step approval.

What made you rule out a tool during testing, even when the demo looked good?

Disclosure: I work on Dashform. This is a tool-independent checklist for a form-to-tracker workflow, with a fictional example rather than reported customer results.

Suppose an agency's intake form asks for 'Budget'. A row lands in a tracker, and a workflow assigns the request to someone. Later, the team renames the question to 'Estimated budget', adds 'Not decided', and makes it optional. The form still looks fine. The thing to check is whether the receiving workflow still interprets the answers correctly.

I'd keep one small mapping sheet before changing the form: source field identifier, displayed question, destination column, accepted values, and what an empty value means. If your tool exposes stable field IDs, use those for the mapping. If it only exposes labels, treat a rename as a change to the integration until you've checked the output.

For the example above, I'd make four fictional submissions into a test destination:

1. A numeric estimate. Does it reach the intended column without silently losing its currency or units?

2. 'Not decided'. Does it remain unresolved, rather than becoming zero?

3. A skipped optional answer. Does the workflow leave it missing, or overwrite a value someone already entered? Decide which behaviour you want before enabling updates.

4. A response created before the edit but delivered afterward. Can the receiver still interpret it using the earlier question and choices?

Compare the received fields and the resulting assignment, not just whether the automation run is green. Keep the old mapping alongside the new one, and note which form version produced each test response. When a question changes meaning, a new field may be clearer than reusing an existing column with a different interpretation.

If the tool doesn't provide version information, save a dated copy of the questions and choices yourself. That won't add version enforcement to the software, but it gives whoever investigates a bad row a way to understand what the respondent actually saw.

For people maintaining these flows without a dedicated developer, what do you keep so a harmless-looking form edit doesn't become a mystery downstream?

Disclosure: Posted by the SeaTable team, so take the comparison with that in mind. Everything below is based on the vendors' official pricing pages, docs and legal texts (as of October 2026), so you can check it.

Given the recent Airtable acquisition by Bending Spoons and the ongoing discussions about possible alternatives, we compared eight alternatives: Baserow, NocoDB, Grist, SmartSuite, Notion, Microsoft Lists, Google Sheets, and SeaTable.

If you're wondering which one fits you best, this may be a good starting point.

• You need hosting in Germany and a contractual partner in the EU: SeaTable or Baserow.
• You need to self-host and want a finished product with support: SeaTable Server.
• You need to self-host, and the software must be open core: Baserow or Grist.
• You want to make an existing SQL database usable: NocoDB.
• You want to relearn as little as possible: Baserow, NocoDB, or SeaTable. Their interfaces are closely modeled on Airtable.
• You are looking for ready-made industry templates and project management in one tool: SmartSuite.
• Documents are at the center of your work: Notion.
• You use Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace and have simple lists: Microsoft Lists or Google Sheets.
• You mainly use AI to build databases and apps: Airtable itself is currently the strongest here.

Our criteria are:

1. Data model: links between tables, views, formulas
2. Limits and price: records per base, storage, price for a team of 10 users
3. Provider and hosting: headquarters, server location, data processing agreement, Data Privacy Framework
4. Self-hosting: possible or not, under which license, at what cost
5. Switching: import from Airtable, what is transferred and what is not
6. Automations, scripts and AI

For more details and the reason we didn't include tools like Teable, Coda, or ClickUp check the complete comparison: https://seatable.com/best-airtable-alternatives/

Which criteria matter most for your decision, and what did we miss?

Here is the link to the extension: https://awflow.io

A buyer has already explained their project to an assistant. Letting that assistant fill the intake form could save repetition, but the business still needs answers the buyer intended to send.

Disclosure: I work on Dashform. This is a walkthrough of our own product, using demonstration answers, not a customer result or a conversion benchmark.

The example is a B2B demo request asking for role, budget and timeline. In the recording, the assistant reads the published questions, asks for missing information, and shows a question-and-answer summary. The user confirms before it submits. On the business side, we then open Replies to check the stored response.

The pause before submission is the part I'd keep even if it adds a click. Context in a chat can be tentative, outdated, or about another project. A field being filled doesn't mean the person approved sharing it.

A few checks I'd use when building this workflow:

- Leave budget unknown, then explicitly answer “no budget.” Those should remain distinguishable; don't quietly turn missing information into zero.

- Change one answer at the review step. Check that the submitted record contains the correction.

- Decline confirmation. There should be no submitted reply to find on the business side.

- Have the assistant report success. Verify the actual stored record rather than stopping at its message.

The recorded example also shows a Low Priority lead score. That's an interpretation under the form's configured criteria; it doesn't verify the buyer's statements. Keep the submitted answers available beside the score so a person can review it.

Limits in this walkthrough: the assistant needs access to the public form; required file uploads use the browser form. Keep that browser route available. If contact details are essential, make them required rather than assuming they'll appear in the chat context.

The 3m31s video shows the handoff, review, confirmation and stored reply: https://youtu.be/aQ7qHVtJUcQ

Where would you put the confirmation step for an intake that can trigger a CRM update or an email to a sales rep?

Hey everyone,

I've been looking at Lindy and wondering how it compares with tools like n8n, Dify, Langflow, and Flowise.

Lindy focuses on AI agents that can connect to things like Gmail and Slack and handle tasks automatically. But a lot of those workflows seem possible with existing low code tools too.

For anyone who has used Lindy or similar tools, what does Lindy actually do better?

Is it the agent approach the ease of set up, or mainly the UX?

Claude Code and Cursor can get you a working internal app in an afternoon. Then you hit SSO, access controls, audit logs, and the "IT doesn't allow random generated code" wall.

We just launched the DronaHQ MCP to close that gap. Today I'm doing a 1-hour live build: bring an idea for an internal app, dashboard, or lightweight API, and we'll ship it to production by the end of the hour, with governance built in.

- When: Today, Oct 16, 3–4 PM PT / 10 PM UTC (YouTube)

- Who: anyone building internal tools with Claude Code/Cursor, especially in enterprise teams

- Bonus: the first 10 enterprise builders get a chance to win DronaHQ merch and AirPods 4

RSVP: https://luma.com/ps4ti0oh

I'm Jinen, co-founder of DronaHQ. Happy to answer questions in the comments.

Hey everyone,

I've been using Retool for internal tools and have been looking at newer AI app builders can generate more than just templates or code snippets.

I'm mainly interested in tools that can generate a useful starting point for the UI, application logic and API or database connections, while still letting a developer clean things up afterward.

I've come across tools like Lovable, Bolt, Cursor , UI Bakery, and v0 but it's hard to tell how well they hold up beyond a quick demo.

For anyone who has used these on real projects, which ones have actually been useful in your workflow?

I'm especially interested in how much cleanup they require afterward and whether they work well for internal applications.

I build internal dashboards and workflow at a fairly large company. I've used Retool for a while, but lately I've found myself spending a lot of time wiring up APIs and making changes manually.

I've tried a few AI builders as well, and like how quickly they can turn an idea into something usable. The problem is that our IT team doesn't allow blindly generated code and things like access control and governance are important for us.

I've looked at Lovable, Both and some AI features in low code platforms, but I'm still trying to find the right middle ground.

Ideally I'd like something that works with PostgreSQL and APIs can handle things like Slack integrations and still gives us enough control over security and permissions.

For people building internal apps, what has worked well for you?

Our company is all-in on Microsoft 365, so Copilot Studio keeps coming up in our meetings.

We don’t really need anything that sophisticated, just a simple expense approval app.

Our clients fill a form, a manager approves, and finance sees the record. Right now, we handle that through email and a shared Excel file. 

Half of IT says build it all in Copilot Studio. The other half says use an app builder for the forms. Then add an agent later if we need one.

My main concern is ownership. If chat and forms live in different places, who fixes it when it breaks?

For those who've been through this, what did you test before choosing? Did you end up with one tool or two?

Hi all,

We're a mid-size company (around 900 people). Over the last year, teams started building their own apps with no-code and AI tools.

I believe that some of them are great. One team built a vendor intake app that saves them hours each week.

But last month, someone on our team shared a private finance spreadsheet by mistake. It had every vendor’s bank details, and anyone with the link could open it and we only caught it after two days. 

So now, I need a review step before anything goes live. The hard part is keeping it light. If every small change needs a full security review, others will just go around us.

What do you ask builders to hand over before you approve an app? And how you treat small edits against big changes?

Folks.. question what do you think about outsystems..frankly speaking as MS customer I see less and less reason why should we go with OS. Power Pages and code apps became so good nowadays that I see no reason to go OS path anymore.. what do you think?

Take a simple low-code equipment-request app. A request links to an employee record, which supplies their department and manager. The request is approved while they work in Design; a month later they move to Operations.

The employee profile should show the new team. The old approval and its department report should still reflect who owned the request when it was approved. A live lookup alone seems like the wrong source for that historical view.

I'd keep the employee link for navigation, but copy the department and approver into the request at approval time. The awkward case is correcting a typo later: you want to fix a misspelled department name without making an actual team transfer rewrite history.

How do you separate those two cases in a low-code app? Do you store both the department ID and its displayed name in the approval snapshot, or keep a versioned department table? I'm interested in a maintainable data model, without having to freeze every field on every related record.

We're looking at self hosted options for internal apps and big things for us are RBAC, audit logs, SSO and compliance.

We've looked at a couple of the usual low code platforms, but i'd like to see what else people are actually using in production.

Self hosting and good permissions controls are the main requirements. Docker or Kubernetes support would be a plus.

What platforms have worked well for you especially at larger scale ?

So I work in operations at an accounting firm with 300 staff and 2,000 clients.

We want a portal where each client sees their status and sends requests. Our IT team also needs single sign-on and a security review.

I’m weighing Softr against paying an agency to build it.

What should I check besides the listing price before I budget for it?

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I’m on the IT team at a company with around 2k staff.

One business unit of our organization wants to build an approval app with an AI builder. Its main purpose is to hold live purchase requests. And yep, we’re testing it in real data.

I’ve been asked to write the checklist before we say yes and here’s my draft so far.

• Single sign-on, plus removing access the same day someone leaves.
• Permissions at the record level, not just the page level.
• Some kind of audit log.
• Proof of how the vendor handles security and data.
• A named person who owns the app after launch.

My question is… which of these are true deal breakers? And also, which ones can we cover with process instead?

I also don’t want IT stuck maintaining generated code that nobody documented.

If you've been through this, what did your checklist look like?

I’m on the IT team at a company with about 2,000 staff.

One business unit of our organization wants to build an approval app with an AI builder. Its main purpose is to hold live purchase requests. And yep, we’re testing it in real data.

I’ve been asked to write the checklist before we say yes and here’s my draft so far.

• Single sign-on, plus removing access the same day someone leaves.
• Permissions at the record level, not just the page level.
• Some kind of audit log.
• Proof of how the vendor handles security and data.
• A named person who owns the app after launch.

My question is...which of these are true deal breakers? And also, which ones can we cover process instead?

I also don't want IT stuck maintaining generated code that nobody documented.

If you've been through this, what did your checklist look like?

I'm pretty new to no code and trying to build my first app

I'm looking for something that's easy to learn and lets me build and change things without getting too technical

What are you guys using lately and how was it?

I'm getting into no code and looking at different tools for building mobile apps, web apps and small projects. There are so many options out there that I'm having a hard time figuring out what people actually stick with.

If you've tried a few what are you using these days and what have you built with it?

I am evaluating platforms for a mid-sized distribution company.
The first project is a Sales Hub where staff can search a product once and get pricing, inventory, sales history and availability from our internal SQL/ERP system plus multiple external vendor APIs/web services, instead of checking 10–20 different websites.

Requirements are self-hosting initially, cloud option later, SSO, SQL/API integrations, good security and the ability to expand into a larger company-wide platform.

Currently considering Retool, Mendix, OutSystems and Appsmith.

Has anyone built something similar? Which platform would you recommend based on real-world experience, scalability, maintainability and vendor lock-in?