Two years since first commit of ToolJet
Our motivation behind ToolJet is to improve the productivity of developers. ToolJet helps companies build internal tools and business applications with less engineers in less time.
It’s been two years since the first commit of ToolJet.
Two months later, we open-sourced ToolJet’s codebase on GitHub and launched public beta.
Today our codebase have more than 4,000 commits from 316 contributors. We've also grown from zero GitHub stars in June 2021 to 18.4k stars. Our core team has also grown to more than 25 full-time members.
ToolJet is now loved by 1000s of companies worldwide. Individual developers, startups, scale-ups and even Fortune 500 companies has become extensive users of our low-code platform. In this article, we will walk you through the 2 year journey of ToolJet that we are proud of!
It took two months to go from first commit to the beta launch. ToolJet's HackerNews launch was well received by the open-source community and the repository got more than 1,000 stars in less than 8 hours. Here is our blog post explaining this journey in detail.
We closed our seed round immediately after the launch. Why did we rewrite our backend in Node.js immediately after the launch and fundraise? Ruby is great but since it accounted for only 14% of the codebase, it made sense to have only one language in the codebase. This blog post walks you through our thought process behind this decision in detail. In October, we had more than 100 contributors.
Finally we launched ToolJet 1.0 in January 2022. Major changes:
- Data sources are now decoupled as plugins.
- Added ability to run JavaScript code.
- Added application template library.
- Version control for applications.
- Increased number of in-built UI components to 35 & connectors to 30.
We added support for SSO in March with Google and GitHub as the providers. Multiplayer editing was released in April. It enabled teams to collaborate in realtime while working on the same application. In May, we made it possible to import custom React components to ToolJet.
Our repository crossed 10,000 stars in June 2022, exactly one year since we open-sourced our codebase.
We found that many data analysts were using ToolJet and with their inputs, we added support for using Python within ToolJet. With the help of our community we also translated ToolJet into few languages.We also found that our users wanted more flexibility in interacting with the platform. Ability to interact with UI components using JavaScript/Python was released in July 2022.
ToolJet 2.0 was a major improvement to our platform. Based on the feedback from our community, we redesigned the application builder and the dashboard to make it easier to use. We also added support for creating multi-page apps, switching between multiple development environments, superadmin role with a separate dashboard and an in-built no-code database.
Our repository crossed 300 contributors in January. We also raised another round of funding to accelerate product development.
Today we have 18.4k stars and 315 contributors on GitHub & an active Slack community of more than 1,700 members. Teams around the globe are using ToolJet happily and with the support of the community, we are constantly improving the platform. More new features and improvements are coming soon, stay tuned!
Would love to know your thoughts on ToolJet. Check out our GitHub repository here: https://github.com/ToolJet/ToolJet