Airplane Targets Engineering Backlog
Ravi Parikh, CEO of Airplane, on building an end-to-end internal tools platform
Airplane is selling against engineering backlog, not against another app builder. The core job is turning awkward internal workflows into usable software without asking a team to spin up a custom React or Django project. That matters because these tools are usually narrow, high risk, and deeply tied to a company’s own database, permissions, and business logic, which makes off the shelf SaaS a poor fit and makes faster code based building the real wedge.
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Across internal tools, the default alternative is often to build it internally. Retool’s biggest competitor in practice was also React and custom engineering, which shows the category is created by replacing hand built admin panels, scripts, and one off dashboards before it is created by stealing share from another vendor.
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The common use case is simple but painful, put a safe interface on top of production data so support, ops, or finance can search records, update fields, trigger workflows, and avoid asking engineers to run scripts. Lithic used Retool this way to let ops configure card programs and manage compliance workflows that had previously required engineers editing tables directly.
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Airplane’s code first approach pushes it even closer to the build side of the decision. Appsmith describes Airplane less as a broad app builder and more as a developer tool, while Airplane itself is framed as full extensibility with tasks, views, and workflows. That positioning fits teams that want leverage without giving up code level control.
This category keeps expanding as more operational work becomes software mediated and every company accumulates custom workflows that packaged SaaS does not cover. The winners will be the platforms that feel close enough to building from scratch for engineers to trust them, but fast enough that ops teams can get custom tools in days instead of quarters.