What do you like best about the product?

Superblocks is an incredibly easy way to spin up admin tooling. I honestly use it every single day to manage all of our stacks. I've used things like Retool, Airplane, etc, but I was shocked by how much faster I could move with Superblocks.

We're heavy users of the on-prem agents which let us build admin tooling across a variety of stacks, all with a much lighter compute footprint than self-hosted Retool or Airplane.

Support has also been awesome, the infra team has been super responsive and even merged my PRs against their on-prem agent helm repo.

What do you dislike about the product?

I wish there were an easier way to reuse APIs and blocks across applications. I find it so easy to spin up apps that I'll often do a one-off API or application and want to reuse it later in another app. I think their workflows feature probably fills this gap, but I don't tend to plan out reusability when I'm just spinning up a quick app or test dashboard. I would love to be able to convert things into reusuable blocks.

I do wish the creator seats were a little cheaper. Because we use on-prem agents and SSO, we need the enterprise tier which is a little pricey.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

We use Superblocks to build backroom/admin tooling for our software. We often build experiments that we administer in Superblocks before building out a user facing tool for our customers. Superblocks OPAs also make it really easy to do this across many stacks in a secure way.

What do you like best about the product?

The tool is self-explanatory, easy to use and contains a complete tool set for internal dashboarding. Truly a one-stop-shop. The customer support is helpful and quick to respond. Lastly, they offer a range of hosting/deployment options that helped with our security requirements.

What do you dislike about the product?

You can do custom plot components if with Plotly, but it would be nice to have a more native and rich plotting component.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Internal analytical dashboarding

What do you like best about the product?

Superblock has a lot of important functionality, integrations and workflows that allows you to make forms for external teams like marketing and sales to change assets without the need of developers. The S3, Github, and Secret Manager integrations are game changer ones. I also like that the sales solution engineers are so fast to respond and try to get you unstuck or file new feature tickets so you can move fast.

What do you dislike about the product?

As of writing this review, Superblocks is still missing some important features like multiple devs being able to collaborate concurrently like Figma, ease of use for image handling, UI markers and the ability to dynamically adjust the main form. I trust the team will be able to have these features out at some point.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Superblocks solves the problem of me being able to quickly create internal apps for non-technical teams like sales and marketing to self serve assets and text they want to change without me needing to go into the database or make API calls myself. I can see usage in the future of anything that is not customer facing and work that needs to be done in the backend. The greatest value I see is the ability for backend developers like me who do not want to spend weeks creating UI elements to create a tool that can remove operational burden off my workload.

What do you like best about the product?

I'm not going to regurgitate what's already on the Superblocks website. Here's my honest and raw thoughts on it after using it for a few months:
- The #1 thing you need to keep in mind is that Superblocks is for SAVING TIME and INCREASING PRODUCTIVITY.
- Yes, you can style things and make things fancy in Superblocks, but why bother? You are choosing a platform that is that is going to minimise developer time spent on building internal tooling. Therefore, use the out-of-the-box defaults so that you can have the maximum benefits. Ask yourself an important question. Do you really need to make internal tooling look pixel perfect and follow branding? Because if you want to fiddle with customising everything then do yourself a favour and just write your applications using whatever frameworks you like, your developers will not like being told to do all of that in Superblocks.
- Superblocks is really simple to use with a small learning curve.
- We have a Slack Connection with the Superblocks team and they are very responsive and helpful. We've raised issues and those issues have been investigated and fixed in a timely manner. Thanks guys.
- Our plan is to rewrite all of our internal tooling using Superblocks, of course this will need to be done over time, as and when we have capacity.

In addition, Superblocks means you don't have to worry about the following:
- Writing deployment scripts - It's just a button you press
- Dealing with failed deployments - I've not seen a deployment fail yet
- Keeping dependencies up to date and ensuring dependency versions are compatible with one another - Superblocks handles this
- Having a linter nag at you - Actually it does have one built in but it's not too intrusive and it doesn't actually get in your way
- Trying to satisfy a type checker - There's no type checking, which could be a bad thing, but even as a massive TypeScript fan this has not been a huge issue for me yet
- Being patient whilst a code-analysis tool like SonarQube tries to teach you how to suck eggs 🤨
- Debating folder structure and naming conventions
- Setting up and maintaining code bundling (i.e. Webpack etc)
- Worrying about runtime versions
- Supporting stack trace mapping
- Writing authentication code
- Writing authorization code (for the most part)
- Writing tests (🤫) - You can't write automated tests at the moment, but there are ways around this
- Choosing a frontend framework
- Writing components
- Writing HTML
- Writing CSS
- Worrying about design
- Writing boilerplate functionality (like paging, filtering)
- Worrying about browser support (i.e. checking Can I Use)
- Waiting for someone to write a backend (you can do this yourself)
- Choosing a backend framework

What do you dislike about the product?

I haven't come across any major downsides yet, and I've been using it for some time now. These are my honest thoughts:
- It would be nice to have client-side functions, although we found a couple of workarounds for that for most of our use cases.
- I'm personally not 100% convinced with the whole Superblocks workflows thing. As in, I wouldn't rush to rewrite all my backend logic in Superblocks. But it does have a lot of potential when you consider the RBAC functionality so it's one to keep an eye on. Also, if your team knows nothing about writing backend code then they can easily make a dog's dinner out of the job so if that's the case then it's probably better you just do it in Superblocks 😂
- The code editor is a little poor, I tend to cut the code, paste it into VS Code, make the changes, then paste it back in. It's not a hassle and I prefer doing this as I can use all my VSCode plugins, shortcuts, etc.
- There's no support for writing automated tests. We have ways around this as follows:
1) Selenium (webdriver) testing (yes I'm not a huge fan of this)
2) For complex functions, you can write a unit test suite and check it into source control somewhere. Any time you make an amendment to the function, simply copy/paste the new implementation into that repository and check the tests pass (and add any new tests as per the amendments). This works well for me.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Internal tooling takes long to develop. Superblocks speeds that up so we can deliver faster.

What do you like best about the product?

Easy to connect to my external database and to incorporate that data into my front end elements (tables, dropdowns, other fields). They have good documentation and video tutorials, and I was able to get information quickly via chat, when I needed more help. Their IT team even followed up with me, via email, to let me know that they made an enhancement that I needed.

What do you dislike about the product?

I would have liked an integration that is backwards compatible with MySQL 5.x, but I understand that's difficult because that version is no longer supported. They also don't have an option yet for external users, but I'm hopeful they'll release that version soon.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Superblocks allows me to create tables and forms quickly and integrate those with my data. I can also integrate that data easily with Jotform, and I can pull my Jotform submissions easily by creating a Superblocks integration, to connect to Jotform's API.

What do you like best about the product?

Superblocks has allowed our team to create all sorts of automations, integration and applications for one off to longer term use cases as it fits our needs. The quickness of setting things up for the value it generates has been phenomenal and customer support has been top notch. Quick assistance and replies to all my requests and highly recommend using them to build out anything you think could be automated

What do you dislike about the product?

None so far. For the use cases I've had it run, I have had no issues

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

there are so many metrics, dashboards, workflows that are all spread out or non existant in our organization that have either been hard to make or just not possible. Superblocks has enabled so many capabilities for us and excited to continue to use them moving forward

What do you like best about the product?

Superblocks has been great to automate manual processes such as weekly/monthly reports for other teams in our company. I write mostly in Python so being able to put this code into a Superblocks Workflow or application so programmes are available to colleagues who don't use any code is really helpful. The Superblocks team have been incredibly helpful and quickly in responding to my queries- often sending me clear examples and the documentation available is also well detailed!

What do you dislike about the product?

I have to deal with a lot of spreadsheets and being able to manipulate/create .xlsx files on a timely basis is huge part of my role, sometimes I've struggle navigating my way around the available Python libraries to achieve the goal but as afore mentioned the team have always been incredibly helpful with this!

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Superblocks simplifies the process of encoding programs I've designed for different departments to enhance their workflows and reporting. I've been able to easily transform scripts into applications or schedule routine tasks, allowing myself for greater efficiency and time allocation towards other new projects.

What do you like best about the product?

Building custom integrations and easily building a dashboard for various other products was an awsome experience. When I was stuck on something, support came through with a real person quickly and provided solutions to my problems. Overall an amazing product!

What do you dislike about the product?

There may be a bit of a learning curve if you aren't familiar with API calls or javascript but support is always there to help.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

We needed a dashboard to display ticket data from multiple ticketting systems as well as network monitoring data. Superblocks let us integrate any API and easily parse and display a professional dashboard in a fraction of the time it would have taken to build it from scratch.

What do you like best about the product?

The combination of workflow builder and app builder is great. The UI is very intuitive and documentation is very comprehensive.

What do you dislike about the product?

Price jump from free tier to paid is quite big

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

It is making the creation of API call chain very seamless

What do you like best about the product?

It's extremely robust and easy to get started on, especially when testing use cases or interfaces with internal teams and customers. A real force multiplier for lean teams.

What do you dislike about the product?

Wish there is a way for code written to be maintained off the platform (eg. a Github connection). Can be hard to search, modify or reuse code snippets in larger, more complex projects

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

1. Data ingestion and cleanup interface.
2. Prompt engineering interface