20 Free App Templates from Budibase

Recently, we’ve been quietly building a suite of free, ready-to-use app templates. Of course, we’re biased, but we think Budibase is the best way to build custom internal tools and web apps.

What better way to prove it than building them ourselves?

Our mission is to help developers build incredible tools from scratch, in as little as five minutes. By creating a range of pre-made templates, we’re giving our users an extra shortcut to building amazing custom apps.

Today, we’re happy to showcase a selection of the Budibase app designs we’re proudest of. But first, let’s cover a few basics.

Why would you build a web app from a template?

It’s important to be clear about what an app template is, and why you might want to use one. Building even the simplest apps from scratch can be a mammoth undertaking. Traditional development requires huge amounts of time and money.

That’s if you even have the required technical skills.

These days, low-code tools, like Budibase, are a popular alternative, offering faster, cheaper development, without compromising on functionality. Our app templates are pre-built, low-code solutions for a range of common business problems.

We’ve designed each one to be ready to use as-is. Or, you might choose to use one of our templates as a starting point for your own custom solution.

That’s the beauty of Budibase. You can change any aspect of our templates’ design, functionality, or data layer, to make it your own.

You can even host and deploy Budibase tools however you like, in just a few clicks.

We’ve also created a tutorial on how to build a free inventory management app .

Sounds good, right? Now that we’re on the same page, let’s take a look at some highlights from our selection of free app templates.

Our top 20 web app templates

It’s always hard to choose favorites. After all, what’s a complete gamechanger for one user, might offer little interest to another. So, it doesn’t make much sense for us to try and rank our own templates.

Instead, what we’d like to do is break our templates into a few categories, to show off the full scope of what you can do with Budibase.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at our top picks.

Communicate, collaborate and share

Budibase tools are the perfect way to securely share information, communicate with colleagues, and collaborate across remote teams.

Any of our free app templates can be integrated with a range of communications tools, or leverage Budibase’s built-in email automation.

Check out our round-up of the best web development tools .

Here are a few of our favorite templates to help you work better together.

1. Collect, store and share contacts

Almost every business needs a secure, up-to-date client contact list. But of course, not every contact list is created equal. If you’re like most companies, you probably rely on a half-maintained spreadsheet, that lives somewhere in a shared drive or email chain.

Our template is designed to help colleagues share, update, and access clients’ contact information, with minimal effort. Simply add your data to create a secure, centralized record of all of your customers, and how to reach them.

Use simple mailto commands, or integrate with softphones, VOIP tools, and more, so your team can directly contact clients at the press of a button.

2. Manage documents with ease

Budibase is the ideal solution for sharing, managing, and processing documents. Our legal document management template is the proof.

Law firms deal with more complex documentation than just about anyone. The key is ensuring that clients, colleagues, and other stakeholders have instant access to the most up-to-date version of any documents they might need.

We’ve built our template to simplify all kinds of document request, submission, approval, and sharing workflows. Clients and colleagues alike can submit, download, or request new documents, at the press of a button.

With custom RBAC, advanced searchability, and secure file storage, our template is the ideal solution for managing even the most sensitive documents.

3. Connect with employees and colleagues

In the age of remote working, an effective employee directory is at the heart of any successful business. These days, your team could work together for months or even years, without ever meeting in person.

As a remote-first company, we know this struggle better than anyone. This template is designed to build an open, communicative culture between remote colleagues, wherever they are.

Colleagues can quickly search and access information on their coworkers, including bios, contact details, professional information, photos, and more. There’s even a self-service form for users to update their details.

Simply populate our template with your staff’s data, and our directory is ready to go. We’re pretty sure our template is the fastest way you can build a directory app .

4. Request, submit and approve content

For marketers, they say content is king. However, implementing a successful content marketing plan is trickier than you might think. One of the big challenges is delivering high-quality, on-brand content, to tight deadlines.

Our content approval software template is designed to help busy editorial teams do exactly this. Create briefs, assign tasks, submit drafts, and approve copy, from a single, user-friendly app.

Use our template to manage remote teams, client projects, freelancers, or blog contributors.

We’ve used conditional formatting to tailor UIs to each project’s stage in your editorial pipeline. Our template offers maximum efficiency, without compromising the quality of your content.

Dazzle customers and clients

More and more businesses are using customer-facing web apps to provide better, faster, and more satisfying experiences. We’ve created a range of tools for interacting with the public, and gated platforms for communicating with existing clients.

5. Arrange call-backs with ease

Our call-back form template is, without a doubt, one of our most popular tools. After all, pretty much every website needs a contact form. So why did we decide to reinvent the wheel on this one?

The simple answer is that Budibase does it better.

You see, with most form builders, when a user submits their details, really all the tool does is ping you in a designated mailbox. This is something, but it’s not exactly the slickest solution, especially for large businesses.

With Budibase, what you do with your form data is up to you. We offer a huge range of third-party integrations , to send data to CRMs, softphones, calendar apps, you name it.

It’s the perfect way to automate client communication workflows, in just a few clicks.

6. Manage customer complaints

In a similar vein, we’ve built our complaints record template to turn negative customer experiences into positives. Every customer complaint is a learning opportunity, but only if you have a robust system in place to log interactions.

Our template is the answer.

Members of the public or internal users can submit detailed, consistently formatted complaints, in just a few seconds. With this lightweight, single-screen app, your team can manage all aspects of customer complaint processes.

We’ve used our Markdown Viewer component to automatically create attractive, shareable complaint reports. Add your own category options to our submission form, or use formula variables to create advanced automated taxonomies.

7. Estimate project costs

Our free app templates are perfect for project management. Use our project cost estimation template to create and share detailed, itemized quotes, that closely match your client’s requirements.

Set hourly rates for different project elements, provide time estimates and let our template handle the rest. Our template breaks all projects up into individually costed items. Use our simple form interfac e to quickly create in-depth quotes, in seconds.

Manage costs and compare spending against estimates, at a client, PM, project, or individual item level.

This template is built for speed. Create as many project items as you need, with our simple, looping form interface.

8. Build a client portal

Client services are a huge resource sink. Anyone who’s ever worked in an agency environment can tell you how much time is wasted on repetitive questions, project updates, document requests, and other avoidable tasks.

Use our client portal template , to provide, smoother, faster, experiences for internal users and clients alike. We’ve provided a range of self-service functions, so clients can request assets, submit documents, and provide project briefs.

We’ve created conditional UIs, based on each project’s current status. Users are seamlessly guided through the required actions to bring each project from initiation to completion.

With intuitive user experiences and streamlined access to information, your clients will love using our portal template.

Streamline operations

Many of our most popular free app templates are built to automate tasks, drive efficiency, and streamline internal processes. They say time is money. Budibase is the ideal tool for eliminating hidden costs relating to approval workflows , administrative tasks, and more.

Here are some of our top templates for building efficient internal processes.

9. Calculate commissions

Performance-based benefits are a great way to motivate employees, but managing them can be a huge time sink. Say goodbye to relying on spreadsheets, whiteboards, or back-of-the-napkin sums to figure out commissions.

Our commission calculation template offers a better way.

We’ve created a simple, automated platform to figure out how much commission each salesperson is owed, based on their length of service, and performance. Colleagues can simply register sales, and our template takes care of the rest.

Quickly adjust our formulae to match your commission rules, and add your sales team’s information, to create a fully functioning calculator tool, in seconds.

10. Manage assets

Keep track of device deployment, rental, maintenance, and retirement, with our IT asset management template . We’ve created a single advanced web app template, where users can request devices, and service teams can manage maintenance.

Our template even handles maintenance scheduling, as well as using depreciation formulas to calculate the current value of each of your assets. With complete customization, our template is the perfect solution for cost-effectively managing assets.

This free app template is also the perfect example of Budibase’s data visualization capabilities. Our platform offers a wide range of beautiful chart components, that can display all kinds of bindable data.

11. Respond to incidents

Respond quickly to all kinds of incidents, and protect against future occurrences. Our IT incident report form template is the perfect solution for quickly reporting and managing technical issues, security breaches, and more.

IT incidents are a bigger risk factor than ever. Data loss, service interruption, and reputational damage all bring enormous costs. The key to minimizing these is responding quickly when incidents do occur.

We’ve provided a simple, intuitive form, where even non-technical users can submit detailed incident reports. Your IT team can then use our admin sections to classify, respond to, and learn from incidents.

Customize our template’s forms and data, to build the perfect incident report tool for your unique needs.

12. Track goals

We’ve created a few apps for tracking goals across your business, but our favorite is our OKR goal tracker. We love the OKR framework in general, for breaking high-level objectives, into more manageable, trackable key results.

At Budibase, we actually use a similar app ourselves, since we’ve found the OKR system to be one of the best ways to motivate employees and build ownership over our strategic goals.

Use our template to visualize your progress across all of your objectives and key results. Quickly create detailed goals, and log your progress along each element.

You can use our access control tools to configure this template to your own requirements. Ensure that only relevant users can access each goal, or make changes to your data.

Process and monitor data

Nowadays, data is at the heart of everything we do. Businesses rely on accurate, reliable, and easy to understand data, to make all kinds of decisions. With intuitive data entry, visualization, and processing, Budibase is leading the charge.

Here are some of our top picks for free app templates to manage your business data.

13. Manage school attendance

In the education sector, gathering and analyzing data is critical for managing student behavior, attendance, and performance. Our school admin panel embeds seamlessly into your daily operations.

Teachers can use simple app screens to record student attendance and tardiness, or spending on lessons and field trips. This quietly creates a robust dataset, that can be monitored and analyzed by leadership teams.

Drill down into individual students, or monitor entire cohorts, by their class, gender, or year group.

Our template is built to help educational leaders make better decisions, and empower each student to reach their full potential.

14. Control fleet costs

Budibase offers incredible, automatic data transformation. Check out our remote fleet management system to see this in action.

Again, the idea here is to gather usable data from your normal daily operations. In this case, drivers can submit basic daily check-ins, covering their mileage, fuel expenses, and any other relevant journey information.

We’ve then created a number of formula variables, to calculate fuel consumption, running costs, and more, at a driver or vehicle level.

We’ve even built-in tools for registering and monitoring vehicle maintenance. Use our free app template to ensure you’re getting the maximum value out of every single vehicle in your fleet.

15. Maximize product quality

Our manufacturing quality control checklist is a simple, free tool for identifying defects and maximizing product quality. Your QA team can complete checklists in seconds, using an intuitive, customizable multi-step form.

Each checklist submission creates a new database entry, with a relationship to the relevant product. That way, management teams can quickly spot trends in the locations, products, and operatives that have the highest incidence of defects.

Create custom automation rules to supercharge our template, based on your internal processes. Quickly set up notifications for defective products, or flag and trigger recalls when issues are widespread.

Our template isn’t just an effective way to complete checklists. It’s also the perfect way to gather product quality data, to supercharge your operations.

16. Manage inventories

In the age of global, just-in-time supply chains, manufacturing businesses must handle large volumes of data to remain cost-effective. Our manufacturing inventory management template is built to track and oversee raw materials, works-in-progress, and finished goods.

Of course, there are countless inventory management tools available on the market. The beauty of Budibase is that you can build a fully custom solution, without incurring massive development costs.

Use our template to get started. We’ve provided simple CRUD functionality, to create, read, update, or delete stock entries. You’ll also find a dedicated analytics screen, to quickly view stock volumes and values, across multiple locations.

You can even connect your existing data to Budibase, with full support for MySQL, Postgres, REST API, Airtable, and more.

Supercharge profits

Of course, one of the key reasons for using a free app template is your bottom line. In business, everything is a cost/benefit calculation. We get that. That’s why we’ve built a range of templates that are specifically aimed at boosting your profitability.

Here are just a few examples of how you can use Budibase tools to cut operating costs, and boost revenues.

17. Instant equipment rental

One pain point for many businesses is ensuring that their employees have the tools they need when they need them. The key here is achieving fast access to equipment, without overspending or creating redundancy in your asset stock.

Our employee equipment checkout form is the perfect solution. Give your team a usable, responsive tool for making instant device requests. Budibase gives you the power to set up your own approval rules, using manual review actions, or automations.

Our template isn’t just a better way to request equipment. It’s also the perfect way to gather data on demand for different kinds of devices, helping your team to make better decisions about procurement and deployment.

18. Authorize recurring payments

Budibase tools are a powerful way to improve your CRO. Our professional, intuitive web app templates are the ideal way to guide users to complete sales. Take our recurring credit card authorization form as an example.

Many online businesses suffer huge drop-off rates, because of poor checkout experiences. Our free template offers an alternative, with a clean, effective multi-step form, for setting up recurring payments.

With self-hosting, external data support, and a range of third-party integrations, Budibase gives you complete control over how you process and store customers’ payment data. Use our template as an attractive front-end interface, for your existing payment processes.

19. Gather leads

Attract and qualify sales opportunities with our incredible multi-step lead form . Any marketer will tell you that lead generation forms are a tricky balancing act. You need to gather enough information to assess leads’ potential, while also offering a quick, slick UX, to secure completions.

Many businesses never find the perfect compromise. Our template is the answer to your prayers. We’ve created an attractive digital form, with a single text field on each step. Maximize completions, by ensuring users never feel overwhelmed or confused.

Send form data directly to sales professionals, calendar apps, CRMs, and more. With Budibase you have complete flexibility to embed our templates into your existing sales and marketing funnels.

20. Slash hiring costs

Attracting talent costs money, but you need talented people for your business to grow. It can be a never-ending cycle. Our responsive job portal template is the perfect way to find, assess, and onboard candidates.

We’ve used role-based access control to provide incredible user experiences for recruiters, internal teams, and candidates alike.

Add job descriptions, publish new roles, and receive applications from our free web app template. Candidates can fill in customizable application forms, attach resumes, and track their progress.

Best of all, our portal apps work perfectly on all kinds of devices. Empower users to apply for open roles, anywhere, any time, on any device.

Customize, deploy, and use our free app templates

Budibase templates are deployment-ready, fully customizable tools, built-in our leading low-code platform. Each one comes along with the full functionality and flexibility that every Budibase tool boasts.

Plus, they’re totally free.

Developers around the world love Budibase, for fast, cost-effective builds. We offer:

• Optional self-hosting.
• External data support.
• Third-party integrations.
• Mobile-friendly apps.
• Custom automations.
• Internal database.
• Low-code design tools.
• Advanced app components.

This is just a selection of what Budibase can do. Take a look at our full range of templates for more inspiration.

Or, to find out more about our leading open-source, low-code platform, head over to our product page .