Reflecting on 2023 and Looking Ahead to 2024

2023 has been an incredibly exciting year for Appsmith, filled with growth in our community, exciting new features in our product, and achievements as a company. Looking back, I’m incredibly impressed at what our team, and extended community members have accomplished. Let's dive deeper into the highlights of this remarkable year.

Here's a TL;DR of some key milestones we achieved this year:

• More than 120k apps published using Appsmith

• The introduction of our new community portal

• More than 35 videos and online events

• Our first virtual conference - Appsmith Innovate

• A growth from 22k to 30k stars on our platform

• 5413 issues successfully resolved

• 5563 commits pushed to our repositories

• 5118 PRs merged

• The Discord Community experienced an impressive 55% growth

Let's explore the details!

In 2023, our focus for Appsmith was to get you to solutions more quickly by introducing features that address the needs of mid to large teams. We added features such as environments, which allow you to manage different stages of development, improved Git integration for easier collaboration and change tracking. And custom JS libraries to extend the functionality of your apps based on your needs.

These updates have helped businesses solve their challenges more effectively. For example, HIFI reduced their debugging time by 75% and their information tracking time by 50% using Appsmith. GSK developed an app in just one sprint to patch their fleet of 3,500 Linux Servers. And EDIA reduced the time required to build a new collaborative platform by 80%.

We appreciate and hear your feedback, which is why we focused on improving stability, security, and support experience. Throughout the year, we resolved 5413 issues, made 5563 commits to our repositories, and merged 5118 pull requests to provide a robust and reliable platform for your Appsmith apps.

As part of our commitment to enterprise readiness, we introduced a new usage-based pricing model, offering more flexibility and affordability. This allows teams to choose the pricing plan that best suits their requirements and pay for the features and resources they use.

In terms of numbers, we surpassed 120k apps published using Appsmith, indicating widespread adoption and usage. Additionally, we successfully hosted our first virtual conference, Appsmith Innovate, bringing more than 60 community members together to share knowledge and experiences.

This year, Appsmith launched a new Community Portal. It augments our Discord community, and offers a permanent home for training, tutorials, best practices, and other Appsmith content. Most importantly, it provides the opportunity for community members to contribute directly to this content library. Throughout the year, the portal saw the publication of several articles, showcasing the community's knowledge and expertise. We are grateful to community members like Bobur, pchambless, paulmcf87, etheric42, and dncpax for their valuable contributions in answering questions, helping others on Discord, and contributing to the Community Portal.

The Appsmith community grew significantly, with approximately 55% more Discord users joining the discussions. Our GitHub stars increased from 23k to 30k, reflecting the recognition of Appsmith's capabilities and supportive community that has formed around our open source platform.

To encourage collaboration and knowledge sharing, we introduced the ability for community members to create and publish templates to the Community Portal. This allows you to showcase your use cases and provides inspiration for others. Additionally, the Appsmith team created 10 new templates, like the customer support dashboard, order fulfillment tracker, delivery service management, and more.

Throughout the year, we hosted our first virtual conference and shared 49 videos and hosted 39 livestreams, demonstrating the best use cases of Appsmith with technologies like MongoDB Atlas and Google Cloud Run.

We are immensely grateful for each and every member of the community and look forward to even more engagement in the coming year.

In 2023, we made significant progress in enhancing and expanding our capabilities. Throughout the year, we made around 40 releases with numerous enhancements, bug fixes, and exciting new features. Some of the notable new features include:

• Custom JS libraries

• Auto Query Binding

• Mobile responsive layouts

• Datasource environments

• Programmatic Access Control

• Mutable JavaScript Variables

• Google Cloud Run deployments

• Default Git Branch and Branch Protection

• 1-click data binding

• SCIM (System for Cross-domain Identity Management)

This year, we introduced integrations with popular Language Models (LLMs) such as OpenAI, Google AI, and Anthropic, allowing users to build their own AI applications. These integrations enable developers and businesses to leverage AI to improve their apps and automate processes.

Additionally, we implemented co-pilot features that simplify the creation of functions and queries within Appsmith, enabling users to quickly generate code snippets and automate repetitive tasks.

We introduced an Oracle integration and made substantial improvements to GSheets, including the ability for users to have a specific scope instead of the entire drive and the introduction of SSH tunneling for MySQL.

In 2024, we will focus on improving the user experience and expanding Appsmith functionality. The focus will be to simplify the developer experience for new users and improve performance for viewers. We will introduce a variety of templates and case studies to inspire you and encourage your creativity. We are also planning innovative ways to engage with the community, including virtual events and opportunities for in-person meetings. Additionally, we are committed to empowering users with new features . Here are some upcoming features:

We will be shipping multiple features, but here are some key themes to look out for. First, we have our core value proposition of creating beautiful applications. With Appsmith, UI building has already become much easier. However, with our new Auto-Layout system, positioning, sizing, and alignment will be simplified to a whole new degree. This system will also improve UX by providing page layout options and making all applications accessible on any device, as the widgets will now react to different devices.

We also understand the importance of UI customization. We are working on a framework that will allow you to add new widgets to the platform. These widgets will maintain the same quality as our native widgets. Additionally, we are enhancing the framework to improve the teaming engine. This includes providing more theme customizability options and ensuring greater consistency.

We understand that application development becomes much more efficient when you can reuse business logic and components across your applications. To facilitate this, we are introducing modules. Modules enable you to create custom reusable pieces of code, such as widgets, queries, or JavaScript, and package them into a single entity that can be shared across your application.

Furthermore, you can version control and distribute these modules, as well as include them in your Git history. The best part about modules is that they function just like an MPM package.

We understand that each team has its own unique set of software development lifecycle practices, and we believe that Appsmith should seamlessly integrate into those practices.

To achieve this, we are extending our integration to CI/CD. This means that we can receive webhooks and automatically trigger deployments on branches, allowing all of our application code to go live together. However, CI/CD is not the only workflow we are focusing on. We are excited to announce that we will also be launching Workflow Automations.

Workflow automations are quite common, with many tools available. However, what makes Appsmith unique is our focus on automating human-in-the-loop tasks that require approvals. These workflows involve multiple steps and multiple users, such as KYC verification or refund approvals. We understand that building such workflows can be challenging.

That's why our workflows are developer-focused, just like everything else in Appsmith. This means that they are fully code-enabled, allowing you to refactor, modularize, and check-in via Git version control.

Workflow automations are currently in beta! You can sign up for the beta program here.

As we say goodbye to 2023, we want to express our heartfelt gratitude to the amazing Appsmith community, customers, and talented team for helping us to make this year a success.

Now, we are excited and filled with anticipation for the year ahead. Get ready for another year of innovation, growth, and success with Appsmith!