Show HN: Plasmic — open source visual builder for React

Why the decision to release it as OSS?

Hello again HN!

We’ve been working on this tool for several years now and got HN’d in the past (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29563629), but we’ve just released it as an open source project.

It combines some seemingly disparate genres:

- Webflow, Wordpress and other page builders

- Retool and other tool builders

- Glide and no-code app builders

- Contentful and other CMSes

Today these are different tools to specialize in, but the line between, say, a website and an application is blurry (consider an ecommerce storefront with user logins). With the right foundations, we think these can be unified—Plasmic’s UI can adapt to different levels of control for different personas/tasks.

But more importantly, unlike existing tools, Plasmic integrates with codebases. This is critical to making low-code scale past the complexity ceiling that all such tools (including Plasmic) have. You can drag and drop existing complex React components, and you can visually create new UIs/components within traditionally-coded applications, seamlessly weaving code and no-code.

Main use cases we’ve seen:

- Content management: let marketing drag/drop your React components to build landing pages in your Next.js website, with design guardrails

- Applications: let developers and technical users quickly build internal tools, client portals, and business software

- Website builder and design tool that doesn’t limit you to some built-in ecommerce platform, CMS, or hosting

Check out some videos/demos of building:

- Twitter clone: https://youtu.be/rpdjrFuVMog (live app: https://twitter-staging.plasmic.run)

- Service desk app: https://youtu.be/rYqSpUEJSTw (live app: https://tickets.plasmic.run)

- Vercel marketing page: https://youtu.be/itvbmgLZvcM (live app: https://vercel-workflow.vercel.app)

- Shopify headless storefront: https://commerce.plasmic.run

- Apple.com: https://apple.plasmic.run

Plasmic has been in production deployment at companies big and small. But we think it can grow far beyond ourselves as an open source project. We’d love to see it taken in new unexplored directions! Community users have even started using it to build emails with React.Email and mobile screens in React Native—our permission not required.

Would love to hear what you think!