How does Appsmith position itself against competitors like Retool, and in which industries and use cases does it excel?

One of Appsmith’s biggest competitors is actually React. 

In most places where we are adopted, people are moving away from a React or an angular project, and then, using Appsmith. The beauty of using Appsmith is you can embed Appsmith in any of these legacy projects as well. So you have a React project that's running, but you cannot extend it for whatever reason. You can however, build it in Appsmith and simply embed that application inside your React project. This is something that's a huge advantage for Appsmith because you're able to do this in the open source and the free edition, and extend it. 

The second thing that's different about Appsmith is, when you begin paying for Appsmith, it's usage-based pricing. You pay 40 cents per user per hour. You're not paying a seat-based pricing. The reason is, because Appsmith's use cases are immense and they're used by very, very large teams. What seat-based pricing does is it forces you to ensure that you are only paying for those users who are getting similar amounts of value out of the internal apps that you are building. 

In case of Appsmith, some users may be using the internal apps that are built like 15, 20 hours in a month. In other cases they might just be using it for 1 or 2 hours in a month, but we are able to serve all of these different use cases because of our usage-based pricing. So that's a big differentiator. 

The third one of course, which I've been speaking about is open source, self-hosted. The fact that there's a community, and that you can modify and contribute, leads to a lot of differentiation.In fact, Appsmith's project has enabled Superblocks to be built. Superblocks is essentially a fork of Appsmith, it's been built on top of Appsmith and they've gone on to raise, I believe, $40 million. They're proprietary, but they're built on top of Appsmith. So, whenever Appsmith's project gets better, Superblocks also gets better because it's a fork. About Superblocks, we don't really worry much about, because our core project I believe, is still going to be better than using a fork of it. 

When it comes to airplane.dev, their pitch is something different. Their pitch is a lot more around Cron Jobs and being a developer tool rather than something that's actually an application builder that's going to be used by, for example, your customer support team or your ops marketing team. It's more of a developer tool. 

We sort of get bucketed in these categories for sure by analysts and the industry, but we don't actually run into these companies at all when customers compare us. 

When it comes to Retool, I think our positioning is very clear. You have to choose something that's open source so that you're not locked into a proprietary player. Use something that has usage-based pricing instead of Retool's very expensive seat-based pricing. In fact, in their self-hosted edition, you have to pay a large platform fee and only then, do you adopt it. So, something that Retool might charge you hundreds of thousands of dollars for, Appsmith gives it away for free.

We are very well positioned against them and we have a lot of Retool customers—their older customers and very large customers—who actually moved to Appsmith. Over this and the next couple of years, as our project gets more mature, we believe that's going to be a huge trend.