AI App Builder Audits · AI Development Series
Budibase App Audit
Budibase is built so that non-developers can make internal tools. That is the point of it, and it is also why nobody technical has usually looked at the result.
What Budibase actually hands you
Budibase is an open-source internal tool platform aimed particularly at IT and operations teams rather than developers. It can sit over an existing database or provide its own, and it can be self-hosted.
What a Budibase application is made of
- Interface Visually assembled screens and forms
- Data sources Your Postgres, MySQL, MongoDB, REST, or Budibase's internal DB
- Queries Generated CRUD, plus custom queries
- Logic Automations and bindings
- Access Role-based access per screen and data source
- Hosting Self-hosted via Docker or Kubernetes, or Budibase cloud
Budibase deliberately makes the common cases easy, generating standard create, read, update and delete screens over a table with very little configuration. That speed is genuinely useful and it has a predictable consequence: the generated screens expose the whole table by default, and narrowing that afterwards is a job that has to be remembered.
Where it uses its own internal database rather than yours, the usual data-modelling caveats apply too — it is convenient rather than relational, and it will not enforce relationships for you.
What we consistently find
These recur in Budibase deployments.
Generated screens exposing whole tables
The fastest route to a working tool is to point Budibase at a table and take the screens it offers. Those screens show every column and every row unless told otherwise.
Internal notes, cost prices and personal details come along with everything else, and the person building it may not have realised those columns existed.
What it costs you: staff seeing far more of a table than their role requires.Roles configured once and never revisited
Access is set per screen and data source, and it tends to be configured at the start and then left as new screens are added.
The result is a tool where most things are properly restricted and a handful of newer screens are not, with nothing to draw attention to the difference.
What it costs you: gaps that widen quietly as the tool grows.A privileged connection and no audit trail
As with every tool of this kind, the platform connects to your database with one broad set of credentials, so the database cannot tell who is asking.
Combined with write access and no record of who changed what, a mistaken bulk update becomes very difficult to unpick.
What it costs you: changes to live data that cannot be attributed or reversed.Where Budibase is genuinely good
Budibase does something worthwhile: it lets an operations or IT team solve their own tooling problems without waiting for developer time they were never going to get. For forms, approvals and simple operational apps it is a sensible, economical choice.
Genuinely well suited to
- Internal forms, approvals and simple operational apps
- IT and operations teams without developer support
- Organisations needing to keep data inside their own network
- Replacing shared spreadsheets and manual processes
- Quick tools where the alternative is nothing at all
Where it needs engineering behind it
- Anything customer-facing or reachable from outside the organisation
- Tools performing bulk or irreversible actions on live data
- Regulated processes needing a defensible audit trail
- Screens generated over tables holding sensitive columns
- Anything the business genuinely could not operate without
The honest summary: Budibase is a good answer to a real problem, and its strength is also the thing to watch: it is designed for people who are not developers, so the decisions a developer would have questioned tend not to get questioned.
Prefer to watch? The short version of who we are and how we work
Do you need an audit?
Get it looked at if
- It can write to, or delete from, your production database
- It touches personal data, payroll, pricing or payments
- Screens were generated over tables and never trimmed
- The instance is reachable from outside your network
- The person who built it has left, or is about to
You are probably fine if
- It is read-only over data nobody would mind seeing
- A couple of trusted people use it on an internal network
- It is a dashboard rather than a tool that changes things
- Everything it touches is easy to reconstruct
Questions about auditing a Budibase build
The recurring issue is that generated screens expose whole tables. Budibase will build a working interface over a data source in moments, and what it generates reflects the table rather than the subset of it a given user ought to see.
It is open source, self-hostable and perfectly reasonable for internal tools. The care needed is that it is designed to be quick, and quick means screens get generated and shipped without anyone deciding which columns and rows belong on them.
They restrict the app, and how far that goes depends on how the data source is configured. Where the connection is privileged and roles are applied at the screen level, a user who reaches a resource another way is not restricted by the role at all.
Commonly, yes, and usually by accident. A generated screen over a staff table shows every column in it, salary included, because nobody removed the ones that should not have been there. The role was set when the app was built and never looked at again.
It keeps the data with you, which matters, but it also makes patching, access and backups your responsibility. Self-hosted internal tools are the ones most likely to be quietly out of date, because they work and nobody has any reason to look at them.
You are, which is the honest answer and the reason to look. Tools built by operations teams are often the most useful software in the business and the least reviewed. The problem is not who built it, it is that nobody has read it since.
Trimming screens, revisiting roles and scoping the connection is configuration rather than rebuilding, so it is usually quick. Adding an audit trail is the piece most often missing. The audit is £495 + VAT. Credited back in full against the work.
Not at all — that is what the tool is for, and them solving their own problem is usually better than a request sitting in a developer queue for six months. The gap is simply that nobody asked the questions a developer would have asked: which columns should this screen expose, what happens if someone runs this without a filter, who can reach this. That is what the audit adds, without taking the tool away from them.
Read access to the applications so we can see the screens, data sources, queries and role configuration, plus the database schema and the credentials the platform connects with. If you self-host, how it is deployed and who can reach it matters too.
No, and we would rather say so plainly than pretend otherwise. We build with Claude Code and Cursor, with senior developers designing the system, reviewing every change and testing it. What makes us useful here is not Budibase expertise, it is that the thing being audited is a data layer, a permission scheme and a production database.
Built with something else?
We audit what these tools produce, whichever one you used.
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The audit
Find out what you are sitting on
The AI Code Audit is £495, fixed.
Tell us roughly what you built and how many people use it. If an audit is not the right thing for you, we will say so.
What the report covers:
- What each screen actually exposes, column by column
- Whether roles are enforced consistently as the tool has grown
- What the tool can do to live data, and what is recorded
- How your instance is deployed and who can reach it
We reply within one working day.
