Airplane Built For Developers
Ravi Parikh, CEO of Airplane, on building an end-to-end internal tools platform
This trade off shows Airplane was built to win the build versus buy decision inside engineering, not the broad low code buyer. Airplane starts from code, then adds the boring parts developers hate rebuilding, like permissions, audit logs, notifications, and simple UI scaffolding. That makes it strong for script heavy internal workflows and teams that want source control and normal Python or JavaScript, but it naturally gives up the casual SQL user and drag and drop operator that tools like Retool can reach.
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Airplane’s wedge was turning scripts into usable internal apps. A developer could take a Python script, deploy it, and get a form, permissions, and logging around it. That is why its real competitor was often an in house React or script based tool, not another app builder.
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Retool optimized for the common admin panel. A table, a form, a few buttons, and quick JavaScript or SQL snippets let support and ops teams inspect records and trigger actions. That wider accessibility helped Retool spread to many more end users inside a company.
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The category split is really about who builds and who uses. Appsmith and Retool still center technical adopters, but they are easier to hand off to business teams. Airplane stays closer to an engineer’s repo and workflow, which makes debugging and extension easier, but narrows the top of funnel.
The next step for this market is tools that keep code as the source of truth while making app creation much faster. That direction favors products like Airplane when AI writes more of the code, because developers can still inspect, version, and modify the output instead of being locked inside a visual builder.