@rgov great question, thanks for asking. I actually tried to post a thread earlier and got a message that it was in a moderation queue, but it seems to have disappeared. Anyway, I posted again here.
If you are an existing Webviz user I would love to chat more to hear your thoughts & needs (feel free to DM me or join our Slack). I’ll share more about the differences below.
Our team all worked at Cruise and we highly respect and appreciate the ongoing development there. However, Webviz is first and foremost an internal Cruise tool, and as such is designed to primarily meet Cruise’s needs. We want to take Foxglove in a different direction, with features that benefit the community but which aren’t useful in the Cruise context. For example:
- We are focusing on building a desktop app, which unlocks the ability for direct TCP connections, native code, better caching, more powerful extensions, etc
- We have support for connecting directly to ROS (no rosbridge websocket server required, since we aren’t limited to the browser)
- We added better layout management (configure multiple layouts, easily switch between them)
- On the development side, we ported the codebase to TypeScript (from Flow), and are developing completely in the open at github.com/foxglove/studio (Webviz is tightly coupled to a large internal codebase).
Plus, we have some exciting features on our roadmap:
- ROS 2 support (Cruise has no need for this)
- An extension API, so that teams can easily develop their own panels or extensions without needing to fork the codebase and deploy their own version
- Ability to store layouts on a server and easily share them among team members (Cruise has an internal version of this, but it is strongly tied to internal systems)
- Support for non-ROS data storage formats