scrubadub VS windmill

Hi HN! I’m Arash, one of the founders of Strada (https://www.getstrada.com), a cloud IDE for building automation workflows across your company’s SaaS apps. Strada handles integrations, triggers, infrastructure and observability while letting you write core workflow logic in Python (more languages soon). It's for teams that hit limitations with low-code tools while building with internal apps — eg. Zendesk, Jira, Salesforce, Slack. You can access our docs at (https://docs.getstrada.com).

While working on our first product (a unified accounting API), we learned that as companies grow, their integration teams become more technical but typically still use low-code tools. We also observed that as LLMs are becoming popular, these teams (usually outside of engineering) are adopting more code. For example, we spoke with multiple companies that generate integration code with an LLM and use it in their low-code platform.

Unfortunately, most integration tools are not designed with code as a first-class citizen. They often have limited support for external libraries, restrict how variables are used, and limit how code blocks interact with other workflow steps. But integration developers put up with them because stitching together authentication, scripts, APIs, infrastructure, and observability is time consuming and not a core focus for their teams.

Instead of drag-and-drop blocks, we chose code as the main interface. Tasks that are frustrating in low-code tools become simple with code: conditional logic with layers of branching, complex transformations, or problems that an external library already solves (for example, redacting personally identifiable information with the scrubadub library [1]). Each Strada workflow is a contiguous Python script, and every action configured in the UI can be invoked like a function. We started with Python since it’s popular with teams outside of engineering, like IT, Data, and Ops.

Our goal is to help integration builders focus on logic unique to their business by simplifying everything outside of that:

- Integrations: we handle authentication and provide abstractions for common app actions

- Triggers: workflows can be triggered by a webhook or run on a schedule

- Infrastructure: one-click deployment with automatic scaling

- Observability: detailed logging of workflow actions, payloads, and errors

Today, customers use Strada for workflows like:

- Customer support: receive Zendesk ticket webhook, remove sensitive information, perform sentiment analysis using OpenAI, and escalate problematic tickets

- Customer onboarding: receive webhook with new customer data & files, transform to expected format, send request to third-party API, send request to internal endpoint

What you’ll see from us soon:

- More enterprise app integrations

- A self-hosting option

- More runtimes in addition to Python

- AI for code generation

It’s still early days, but we’re excited for you to try it and share your feedback!

[1] https://github.com/LeapBeyond/scrubadub

Data Handling: Utilizes Windmill for data pipelines, with a primary database powered by PostgreSQL. Auxiliary data storage is handled by MongoDB, with Redis for caching to optimize performance

Look very similar to the script builder portion of https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill, but not open-source, not self-hostable, and without open-source integrations (https://hub.windmill.dev/)

disclaimer: I'm founder of ^

If you need a job queue on Postgres, https://windmill.dev provide an all-integrated developer platform with a Pg queue at its core that support jobs defined in python/typescript/sql

windmill.dev - Windmill is an open-source developer platform to quickly build production-grade multi-step automation and internal apps from minimal Python and Typescript scripts. As a free user, you can create and be a member of at most three non-premium workspaces.

For an alternative to airplane.dev, you can checkout Windmill.

https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill

"Open-source developer infrastructure for internal tools (APIs, background jobs, workflows and UIs). Self-hostable alternative to Airplane, Pipedream, Superblocks and a simplified Temporal with autogenerated UIsm and custom UIs to trigger workflows and scripts as internal apps.

Scripts are turned into sharable UIs automatically, and can be composed together into flows or used into richer apps built with low-code. Supported script languages supported are: Python, TypeScript, Go, Bash, SQL, and GraphQL. "

If you search HN, you'll find the creator of Windmill comment on comparisons to airplane.dev:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

https://windmill.dev is a self-hostable OSS alternative to pipedream

(disclaimer: I'm founder)

I'm genuinely curious what server-side stuff on BC you are referring to. That may have been something added after our assessment. The way I'd generally approach something like that for any of the platforms would be using an external low/no code solution to process webhook data. But it would depend heavily on the use case. For a more developer friendly option I've been really impressed by windmill.dev. We use a mix of n8n and windmill for various needs.

Yes it goes in that direction, however note that you can already do this in a not too hard way.

Our openflow spec is both open-source and has a full openapi definition: https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill/blob/main/openflow...

you can use that to generate client sdks in any languages and build your own dag with it. That's what one of our customer did building a reactflow to openflow library: https://github.com/Devessier/reactflow-to-windmill

It's not as good as the decorator way but we move fast and if you still have interest for it we could prioritize it (and ask for feedbacks :))