Formbricks, Vite, and More - Top 5 Open Source Projects to Watch - October 17, 2023

As part of our weekly open-source newsletter, today we're highlighting five exciting projects making an impact as of October 17, 2023.

First up is Formbricks, an open-source experience management platform that helps companies gather qualitative customer insights through surveys and feedback. It aims to make capturing user sentiments seamless by integrating with web apps and providing robust segmentation options.

Next, we have Vite, a front-end build tool focused on providing an ultra-fast development experience. It skips bundling during development and leverages optimized builds for production.

For UI development, Material UI is an open-source React component library with pre-built accessible components to help developers quickly build user interfaces.

On the backend side, Supabase offers an open-source alternative to Firebase, providing a complete backend infrastructure including a Postgres database, authentication, storage, and more.

Finally, React-pdf allows programmatically generating PDF files using React components for layout.

And don’t forget, we also got this week’s deal!

Formbricks

Formbricks is an open-source experience management platform that helps companies understand customer sentiment through surveys and feedback. It allows for easy integration into web apps with minimal developer effort, while still providing robust customization and segmentation capabilities. Formbricks enables triggering surveys based on user actions, capturing insights at key moments in the customer journey. The platform is designed for privacy and compliance, with the option to self-host if desired. Overall, Formbricks provides an intuitive way to gather qualitative user insights and make data-driven product decisions.

Vite

Vite is an open-source frontend build tool that aims to provide a faster and leaner development experience. It features instant server start without bundling, lightning-fast hot module replacement, and optimized builds with Rollup. Vite supports TypeScript, JSX, CSS, and more out of the box. It has a Rollup-superset plugin interface shared between dev and build modes. Vite provides flexible and fully typed APIs for programmatic usage. By skipping unnecessary work and focusing on developer experience, Vite helps you get your app running with minimal friction. Overall, Vite offers a next-generation frontend workflow that can keep up with lightning-fast iteration.

Material UI

Material UI is an open-source React component library that provides ready-to-use UI components for building user interfaces. It implements Google's Material Design principles and includes a growing collection of accessible and customizable React components like buttons, tables, and text fields. Material UI aims to deliver an excellent experience for developers by handling much of the foundational UI building blocks, while also providing full control over customization and accessibility features. With over 4 million weekly npm downloads and 87k GitHub stars, Material UI has a large community of contributors and users. It has become a popular option for teams looking to quickly build UIs with production-ready React components.

Supabase

Supabase is an open-source alternative to Firebase that provides a complete backend for web applications. It starts developers off with a Postgres database, built-in authentication, instant APIs, edge functions, real-time subscriptions, storage, and vector embeddings. Supabase aims to help developers build full-stack apps incredibly quickly by handling all of the backend infrastructure and APIs. Its Postgres database is portable, has built-in auth, and is easy to extend. Supabase also provides file storage, real-time data syncing for building multiplayer experiences, and integration with machine learning models. With detailed documentation, a CLI tool, and a local emulator, Supabase makes it simple to develop locally and scale up. Its dashboards even allow managing data and auth rules visually for non-technical team members. Overall, Supabase provides the open-source infrastructure to prototype ideas quickly and scale them easily.

React-pdf

React-pdf is an open-source React renderer that generates PDF documents using components. It allows creating PDFs in React by wrapping components in elements like Document and Page. Developers can build PDF layouts by composing components much like building React web UIs. It supports text, shapes, images, stylesheets, and more. The API is inspired by React Native's components and layout system. React-pdf makes it easy to generate PDF files on the web using ReactDOM, or in Node to save PDFs to the filesystem. With its React-based API, react-pdf provides a flexible way to programmatically create PDFs using React components.