30,000 Stars on GitHub in Three Years

Appsmith passed a significant milestone for our open-source project this past week: 30,000 GitHub Stars. I am incredibly honored and grateful to our community that we were able to reach this point. Appsmith is the only low-code platform to reach this level and one of only 500 open-source projects on the platform to exceed 30,000 stars.

Why an open source project? With Appsmith we set out to build a different kind of low-code platform. There’s a spectrum of developer tools from UI frameworks like React or AngularJS to application platforms that fully abstract away coding with visual application design. Our goal with Appsmith was to build a solution on that spectrum that maximizes utility to developers: removing some of the tedious, repetitive tasks associated with app development, while still providing full code-level flexibility and control. We also knew that security was a key consideration for teams — especially when building apps that use sensitive or proprietary internal data sources. Exposing these data sources to a 3rd-party public cloud is simply a non-starter for many developers.

Open source is a natural vehicle for our solution. It allowed us to offer a self-hosted version of Appsmith from the start, giving users a secure option to deploy in their server or cloud environments. It also gave us the opportunity to build alongside the development community, and receive constant feedback along the way. It’s reduced the barriers to adoption for many organizations, giving them the confidence to use a novel platform for high-value internal applications.

Engagement with the community and leveraging the transparency of GitHub have been vital components of our open-source strategy from the start. GitHub has provided us with project infrastructure and fostered a collaborative environment that enables our global community to come together and contribute to the project.

We have built in the open with the community’s support. Issues, pull requests, releases, and release notes are all managed through our GitHub repo. Giving everyone full visibility into the feature backlog, new releases, and the ability to receive notifications the moment that updates are available.

We took this a step further by providing our prioritized product roadmap within our GitHub repo in the spring. Users can now see straightaway what our development team is working on and community members can see when their (always helpful) requests will be addressed.

As a founder, you never own your open-source project. You hope to share it with a passionate community of users and contributors. Your enthusiasm, ideas, and commitment have been the driving force behind the success of our project. Whether you've reported a bug, submitted a pull request, or shared your experiences with others, your contributions have shaped this project into what it is today. We could never have reached the 30,000-Star milestone without that support.

While I am excited about this milestone, we are only starting with the project. There is so much more that we want to achieve, and I’m very bullish on our prospects moving forward.

This year, we’ve introduced commercial editions of our platform. These provide the support, security, and governance businesses need to deploy critical internal applications. As a result, Appsmith is helping enterprises to serve customers more quickly and effectively, manage IT assets and infrastructure, and extend the functionality of their legacy applications.

This success is grounded in our community and the engagement in GitHub. Moving forward, this will not change. Our commitment is to work with you to update and improve our open-source edition. Our community and customers should be able to experience the entire value of our platform.

Thank you again to everyone who has been a part of this journey. Your support is the primary driver of our success. We are thrilled to achieve more extraordinary milestones together. Here's to the next 30,000 stars and beyond! Happy building!