Airplane Reviews & Product Details

Airplane is the closest thing I've seen to a tool that lets my team write code for interactive workflows and automation with zero boilerplate. Almost every line of code I write maps to something user-visible in the interactive experience or business logic. The developer experience, semantics, SDKs and APIs are exceptionally well thought through. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It is still a new and maturing platform. Not all features I would want are fully baked, yet. However, I'm betting that it is going to rapidly mature so we are investing a lot into it. I also think they the fundamental design right enough that it will develop without breaking the tooling we're building on it.

In the way I'm using it, the time it takes to schedule and run tasks takes multiple seconds. I hope to see that improve.

I'm not certain whether it is possible to use Airplane as a fully self-hosted open source project. This would help mitigate business continuity risk if the company behind Airplane fails. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There's a lot to like about Airplane. The feature that sold us compared to any other competitor was their security model. Self-hosted airplane agents are included, making it incredibly easy to define and build workflows that access data maintained on a private network. Unlike other offerings, the self-hosted option does not mean a complete deployment of Airplane, but rather just the actual "tasks" that access private resources, allowing you to take advantage of everything else great about a hosted offering. While it currently lacks no-code features, it has great primitives with their task and view-based approach. Finally, as a technical shop, we love that we can define tasks in Git alongside our code, even leveraging existing code we have. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There are areas where Airplane is still lacking. It would be great if it had more low-code or no-code capabilities, especially around creating UIs. Another thing that is currently lacking, but being worked on, is webhook support. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

When researching internal tool platforms, our team felt frustrated that other tools didn't have the level of customizability we were looking for. Airplane essentially allows arbitrary code execution and an easy-to-use terraform module that fits into our existing AWS setup well.

One thing that also made Airplane an excellent fit for us was the ability to synchronize our Okta directory and roles with the app. Our existing permissions grant workflow lives in Okta; with Airplane's task-level permissions, we could restrict operations to only certain user groups.

Lastly, the app is well-documented and has plenty of examples to help developers. As someone new to TypeScript and Docker, I could still figure out how to build Airplane tasks in these languages without a steep learning curve. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Since Airplane is a relatively new product with many features in beta, we encountered some bugs while developing our initial set of internal tooling. However, the team was highly responsive to feedback and quickly incorporated suggestions. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Many low-code tools are available on the market to build internal apps for your company. What makes Airplane unique (AFAIK) is that everything is code-first: instead of building things in a WYSIWYG editor, you're building your tools in a simple React app with very opinionated—but straightforward—defaults. Airplane provides a lot of simple UI components off the shelf, and the defaults are very easy to learn.

You can think of it more as a DSL (domain-specific language) for building internal tools. This means that, at first, it may be a tad slower to develop your apps compared to other offerings out there. But it's much more reliable in the long run:

you can seamlessly integrate Airplane with the rest of your codebase and—more importantly—your engineering processes: you can review PRs, test, and coordinate releases. If you use a monorepo structure, Airplane integrates with that, too!

Finally, the team is very responsive: they’ll open a shared Slack channel with your team and help you get up to speed. Highly, highly recommend Airplane! ✈️ Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

We're currently using this in early 2023, so these issues may not be present any longer:

- The list of available UI components is still growing—they don't have as complete coverage as other internal tool providers.

- There are still various bugs that come up from time to time. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

- Fast setup: Airplane is a fully-hosted solution, so users can get started with zero installation or configuration. It only takes a few minutes to sign up and deploy a script written in Python, JS, SQL, Shell, or any other language, and create a self-serve lightweight app.

- Rich UI support: Airplane tasks can be configured entirely through the UI. The UI provides a searchable, filterable audit log of all activity. End users of tasks created in Airplane find it intuitive and easy to use.

- Low maintenance: Once an Airplane task is live, it takes no marginal effort to maintain. Airplane uses a Docker-based agent to run tasks, which requires no configuration or work to get started with and is completely abstracted away from the developer–unless, of course, more control is needed, in which case they're highly configurable and flexible.

- Fairly priced: Airplane is free for small teams and has a low per-user fee for mid-sized teams, making it easy to ramp up usage without getting a surprise bill.

- Simple approval workflows: Airplane's most commonly used feature is the ability to grant certain users the ability to run tasks only after another user with a higher level of access has approved them. Approval flows allow users to grant access to sensitive operations widely to people in the business.

- Easy customization: Airplane allows users to write code-based tasks such as Python tasks and Node.js tasks. Users can deploy a script and run it on a recurring basis to generate a report or sync data between various data sources.

- Great customer support: Airplane's customer support is very responsive and helpful. Users can reach out to them via email at hello@airplane.dev.

Airplane.dev is a versatile platform that offers fast setup, rich UI support, low maintenance, simple approval workflows, easy customization, and great customer support. It handles tasks in various languages and has a fair pricing structure for small to mid-sized teams. Thanks to this fantastic tool, our team's productivity has skyrocketed! I highly recommend it. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I haven't found a single thing I dislike. The platform's responsive customer support team has addressed every concern, making it a reliable tool for developers and businesses to thrive. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

When we first started using Airplane, our small dev team was still running scripts in their terminal shell whenever a new customer had to do a data export. We were never able to prioritize internal tooling against building out new feature work - we were using Django admin, and building UIs was very cumbersome.

Enter Airplane. It's not only become a tool our ops and customer-facing teams use every day, it's also become a testing tool for our eng team. It's more than paid for itself in ROI.

What we appreciate the most is it is code-first, and very easy to turn a script in Python into a production-grade app with some lines of code. Airplane handles UI, validation, history, approvals, notifications and logging. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I wish that Airplane had more tools for non-engineers to construct and make changes to the UI. I know they're working on some of these features as a part of their Views offering. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The opinionated yet straightforward design of the UI form elements, which are automatically generated when defining a task, sold us on Airplane. Before Airplane, our internal tools were scripts on the command line, often used by non-technical users. The web interface for the form inputs and integrated approval workflow via fine-grained permissions gives these users more confidence in their changes. Their manager can double-check that the information is correct and approve the execution in the UI.

Additionally, the tasks support various input types, including CSV files, allowing us to do bulk updates quickly! The out-of-the-box resources to connect to our GraphQL API and BigQuery also enabled our development team to integrate into existing data and business logic seamlessly.

The Stripe and Customer Dashboard templates were perfect starting points for a couple of our use cases -- user management and billing/refunds. Developers built upon the template and shipped a user management and stripe refund dashboard within a few days. Before Airplane, the effort and teams involved to integrate this into our existing app would have taken weeks to months.

Integrating Airplane into our existing codebase was easy, and we got the added benefit of automatic deployments.

Overall, Airplane has brought us massive savings in engineering & design time! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Features in beta can be buggy, but via the shared slack channel, the Airplane team has been super supportive about listening to feedback and integrating it quickly for us to keep moving! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

- Airplane allows us to quickly code and deploy automated tasks that are accessible to all engineers without needing to install, configure, or debug personal dev environments

- Runbooks make it incredibly easy to combine multi-step functions from various sources and languages. One such flow we have is using Python and Bash to add a new user in independent third party platforms, all within seconds and through a single interface in Airplane.

- Airplane Views have opened up a world of visibility and management that we were previously missing entirely for our partnerships team. Views have enabled our engineering team to create simple but powerful dashboards for our partnerships team to use when managing users and quickly accessing user information. Previously, this was a multi-step process through Google Workspace that was tedious and non-intuitive.

- Airplane is constantly improving their product and releasing new features! They're very receptive to communication and extremely involved with their product (we've talked with their founders/CEO/CTO, and on one occasion have reported a bug and their CTO directly responded and a fix was deployed hours later). Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

This is a bit of a copout, but we honestly don't have anything we've disliked about Airplane so far! We recognize that Airplane is still a young company(just like ourselves), so while certain dreams and ambitious features of ours are currently missing, they've been very receptive to adding them. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The configuration support when it comes to notifications. A huge selling point for me is Airplane's support for task approval. Being able to have someone else double-check the task that's going to be run is huge! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

At first, the only qualm I had with Airplane was the lack of Python support, but it's since been added. It would be nice if there was support for dark mode but this is a non-blocker and more just QoL. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The Airplane tool is so easy to use. It also seems to be pretty painless for our developers to create tasks inside of the platform as well. This allows us to quickly automate processes. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There have been a few small bugs but the Airplane support team has been very quick to fix them. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.