Migrating to Airplane

How to move existing apps in other platforms to Airplane

If you need to rebuild existing internal tools in Airplane, see below for our recommendations on how to do this quickly. We also offer migration services from other internal tooling platforms that can accelerate this process.

General migration approach

We recommend the following process for migrating your existing apps over to Airplane:

Connect your resources. In Airplane, databases, APIs, and third-party tools can be connected as resources that you can re-use in Airplane tasks.
Create initial tasks. Define tasks that represent the most common database queries, API endpoints, or scripts that run in your app.
Optionally, create views. You can stop at the previous step in many cases. Each task is represented by a web form that your team members can use to trigger that operation. However, to build a more customized UI, create one or more views on top of the tasks you've already built.

Depending on the scenario, you may be able do this incrementally as you establish new use cases in Airplane. Move the important workflows over, and start building new workflows from Airplane. Migrate the rest at a later date to wrap up the process.

Migration service from Retool

App migration from Retool is included in our Enterprise plan. If you're not on this tier but are interested, please contact us here.

To get started with migration, contact support@airplane.dev to let us know that you'd like to import one or more apps from Retool.

From here, the process is simple:

Export your existing Retool apps. In the Retool editor, there's an app action called "Export to JSON" that you can use. There are more details in Retool's documentation on exporting apps.
Take screenshots of the apps you'd like to import. Be sure to take multiple screenshots of an app if there are multiple states that the app can be in.
Send the JSON and screenshots to us.

It may take one or more weeks for us to complete the migration on our end depending on the amount and complexity of the apps you want to migrate.

In some cases, the Retool components you're using may not map one-to-one with Airplane View components and some services work on our end will be required. In these cases we'll let you know a price quote for that services work.

Migrating services from other platforms

If you're not using one of the platforms listed here, we're able to assist with migration on a case-by-case basis. Please contact us at support@airplane.dev to learn more.