Superblocks Essentially Forked Appsmith
Abhishek Nayak, CEO of Appsmith, on building an open source internal tool builder
The key point is that Appsmiths open source codebase lowered the cost of starting a competing internal tools product. In practice, that means a company like Superblocks could begin with working app builder plumbing, then spend its time packaging it for enterprise buyers with proprietary layers, instead of first building tables, forms, data connectors, and deployment basics from zero. That is exactly how open source turns a product category into a faster moving feature race.
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Appsmith was built around self hosting, code level extensibility, and developer workflows. That makes its code unusually reusable for anyone trying to sell the same basic job to enterprises, which is connecting internal apps to databases and APIs, then letting teams edit data and run workflows.
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Superblocks appears to have taken that base category and pushed harder on enterprise packaging. Later material centers on running in the customers environment, using customer compute for workflows, and adding reusable workflows, scheduled jobs, and AI based app generation. That is less a different category than a different commercialization path.
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The broader market context is that Retool defined the modern internal app builder category, then fast followers like Appsmith and Superblocks attacked from different angles, open source and price in Appsmiths case, enterprise deployment model and workflow architecture in Superblocks case. The product surface keeps converging because the underlying jobs are the same.
Going forward, the center of gravity shifts from basic CRUD building blocks to control planes around them, security, hosting model, workflow reuse, source control, and now AI assisted generation. Open source keeps compressing the value of the base layer, so winners capture more of the market by owning enterprise distribution, governance, and the fastest path from data source to working internal software.