Open Source App Store for Internal Tools
Abhishek Nayak, CEO of Appsmith, on building an open source internal tool builder
The real bet is that internal software can become a reusable catalog instead of a one off engineering project. Appsmith is trying to turn common back office jobs, like refund dashboards, KYC review queues, support admin panels, and approval workflows, into templates a developer can fork, connect to their own database or APIs, and ship quickly. That creates a middle layer between buying a giant system like SAP and building every tool from scratch.
-
Salesforce is the closest proof point. Its ecosystem works because a company can install a business app, then adapt it to its own data and workflows. Appsmith wants the same behavior for internal tools, but with open source apps that teams can inspect, self host, modify, and reuse across companies.
-
The reason this can work is that most internal apps look similar under the hood. Across Retool, Airplane, and Appsmith, the repeated pattern is a table, a form, a few buttons, permissions, and a connection to a production database or SaaS API. That sameness makes templates portable in a way customer facing apps usually are not.
-
The marketplace angle also changes distribution. Instead of winning one team at a time with a builder, Appsmith can win through prebuilt apps for specific roles and niches, like a municipality permit tool or a fintech ops console. That is especially valuable in the long tail of organizations too small for heavyweight enterprise software, but too complex for spreadsheets.
If this model matures, internal tool vendors will compete less on basic drag and drop builders and more on who owns the largest library of working business apps. The winner will look less like a single app builder and more like the default repository where companies start from an existing workflow, then customize from there.