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Overview

A SuperPlane app is a workspace where you design and run long-lived, event-driven software engineering workflows.

Each app brings together five core building blocks:

  • Canvas — The workspace where you design and run workflows. It is a graph of nodes connected by subscriptions that define how events flow between steps. Unlike a linear pipeline, a Canvas is an infinite space that can hold multiple independent graphs and define multiple workflows, each with their own paths of execution.
  • Console — The operational surface for the app. It turns workflow state into an at-a-glance view with dashboards, runbooks, tables of live data, and charts.
  • Memory — Persistent, app-scoped storage for JSON data. Workflows can read and write to Memory to share state across runs and power Console dashboards.
  • Files — The git repository backing the app. It stores the canvas.yaml and console.yaml definitions, along with any other files or scripts your app needs, enabling version control and infrastructure-as-code practices.
  • Agent — A built-in AI assistant that helps you design workflows, make canvas changes, and troubleshoot failed executions.

These building blocks work together to provide a complete platform for software engineering automation.

When you build a SuperPlane app, the core components interact to create a complete operational tool:

  1. Events trigger workflows: An external event (like a GitHub push or a PagerDuty incident) triggers a node on the Canvas.
  2. Workflows process data: The Canvas executes the workflow, transforming data, calling external APIs, or waiting for human input.
  3. State is saved: Throughout the workflow, nodes can read and write JSON data to Memory, preserving state across runs.
  4. Operators monitor and act: The Console reads from Memory and live run data to display dashboards, KPIs, and actionable buttons for human operators.
  5. Everything is versioned: The entire configuration of the Canvas and Console is saved in the Files repository, allowing you to draft, commit, and publish changes safely.
  6. AI assists operations: The Agent can read the app’s state, inspect runs, and propose changes to the canvas to fix issues or add features.

This architecture means you do not just build a script—you build a fully operational application with its own UI, state, and version history.

To get started with building your first app, see the Quickstart tutorial.