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Superblocks

Score9.8 out of 10

3 Reviews and Ratings

What is Superblocks?

Superblocks is an IDE for internal tooling – a programmable set of building blocks for developers to create mission-critical internal operational software. The Superblocks Application Builder to assemble flexible components and connect to databases and APIs. Users can create REST, GraphQL, and gPRC endpoints call them programmatically from code or 3rd party web-hooks while Superblocks handles infrastructure.

Top Performing Features

  • Scalability

    Ease of scaling up or down to meet demand

    Category average: 8.2

  • Platform management overhead

    Resources required to keep platform up and running

    Category average: 7.4

  • Upgrades and platform fixes

    Ease of deployment of major upgrades or problem fixes

    Category average: 7.7

Areas for Improvement

  • Issue recovery

    Ease of recovery from problem state

    Category average: 7.3

  • Platform access control

    Rules controlling what data different user categories can access

    Category average: 7.8

  • Services-enabled integration

    Ability to integrate with cloud applications and data via APIs and pre-built connectors

    Category average: 8

Recommend Superblocks for building internal apps and saving engineering time and resources!

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We decided to move all our internal apps to Superblocks almost two years ago. It's helped us replace a few different platform layer tools (Google Cloud Scheduler, App Engine, Mode, Retool) and enabled us to build much faster within our team, without having to think about maintaining infrastructure. Another big thing for us was that we have engineers writing in Python (more data heavy stuff), and engineers writing Javascript/Typescript. Now everything can live in one place based on business needs.

It's an incredible tool for building internal tools for your company and product. Highly recommend!

Pros

  • Easy to use User Interface builder for building internal apps
  • Scheduled Jobs and Workflow builder in multiple languages
  • API builder for support your User Interface for your internal apps

Cons

  • More flexibility on UI component designs

Most Important Features

  • UI builder – we have multiple micro-apps our team uses to operate our business
  • Scheduled Jobs – we've automated a lot of our work using jobs from generating reports all the way to taking images from space from NASA and posting it to our Slack
  • Workflows – we've abstracted a lot of our business logic into workflows so they can be used across different apps

Return on Investment

  • We've saved thousands of developer hours that would have otherwise spent on maintaining infrastructure

Alternatives Considered

Retool, Google Cloud Functions and Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling

Ease the Development

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Throughout the past year, Superblocks have been our team's superpower. In terms of our internal operations infrastructure, Superblocks powers virtually everything. Slack reporters tell us how much money we spend on advertising each day (we spend $100 million or more each year!) to Superblocks-based apps that help us manage client success and predict revenues.

Pros

  • Schedule Job
  • Build Custom Tools
  • Build App

Cons

  • It would be great to enhance the reporting features so developers are able to display data individually, requiring less configuration.
  • There is a bit of a learning curve to integrating third-party tools, and it could be a deal breaker if it is made a bit simpler.
  • Better documentation of them would really help in better implementation of things

Most Important Features

  • Building Internal Tools
  • App Development
  • Automation of Workflow
  • 3rd Party Integration

Return on Investment

  • It helped us to cut over development time
  • It helped in automating our workflow
  • It ease down's our development by around 30-40%