The tech stack behind Sociabli
Sociabli was built with one core idea: help creators and communicators automate their crossposting workflows without the overhead of bloated software. To make that happen, we’ve combined modern frontend tools, a powerful workflow engine, and a pragmatic infrastructure—lean, flexible, and fully owned.
Here’s a peek under the hood.
🧱 Frontend: TypeScript + React + Clerk
Our frontend is built using TypeScript and React, giving us both reliability and flexibility. We use the Material UI framework for a clean, responsive, and consistent interface.
For authentication and authorization, we rely on Clerk, which lets us handle users, sessions, and secure access logic without reinventing the wheel.
We deploy the frontend to Netlify, where we also use Netlify Functions to abstract the connection to our workflow engine. This keeps the client app decoupled from execution logic and ensures smooth performance even with dynamic user interactions.
⚙️ Workflow Engine: Self-Hosted n8n
At the heart of Sociabli’s automation lies a self-hosted n8n instance. It listens for triggers (like new posts in RSS feeds) and executes workflows based on user configurations.
Every automation—from post routing to scheduling—is executed inside this dedicated engine, giving us full control and flexibility, without locking into a SaaS provider.
🗃️ Storage: From SQLite to Supabase
We started light with a local SQLite database. However, after experiencing file corruption, we migrated to Supabase—a hosted PostgreSQL solution that offers powerful real-time capabilities, easy scaling, and peace of mind. Supabase now holds workflow metadata, and app configuration in a reliable and structured way.
💾 Backup Strategy: Git + n8n
Backups are part of the core system, not an afterthought. Every night, our workflow engine runs a backup process that commits user workflows as versioned Git commits. This gives us not just recovery options, but also workflow history tracking.
📝 Add-on: The Blog as Code
Our blog lives in a headless CMS, which exposes articles via RSS. We use Eleventy (11ty.dev)—a fast and elegant static site generator—to build the blog pages. These static files are deployed directly through Netlify’s build pipeline, ensuring minimal latency and maximum reliability for our content delivery.
Why This Stack?
We chose these tools not because they’re trendy, but because they’re:
- Modular — Each part can evolve independently
- Open — We prioritize open-source, transparent technology
- Minimal but powerful — Just enough tooling to solve the problem, nothing more
Sociabli is designed to be lightweight and sustainable. With this stack, we can move fast, iterate safely, and stay in full control of our platform.