We started working on UniDeck in November 2024 as a way to ease how our team managed clients and projects. We were using various tools such as Trello for task management, Google Calendar and Meet for meetings, Gmail for communication, GitHub for code, and Grafana for monitoring. Navigating all of these apps was not that complicated, but still, one common thing was that going into a meeting, someone would have missed some critical detail.

So we decided to look for tools that would let us navigate different services in a single page, preferably a new tab page or at least a fast-to-load app that we could integrate into our daily flow and have a glimpse of what's going on as we go through our day.

Looking through different tools, it quickly became apparent that the only complete approach would be to connect a bunch of bots to our Discord or Slack server. This approach would work for a while, but as time went on, it became apparent that the number of notifications made almost everyone mute the bots' channel and miss even more important updates.

Our solution to this problem: UniDeck. A drag-and-drop tool that would connect to any tool we'd like and display a widget with important information from that service. We started implementing widgets for the services we used most frequently, and by the end of 2024, we had a solid app that helped our productivity, organization, and kept everyone in the loop.

How does UniDeck work?

UniDeck works by allowing users to drag and drop widgets for different services and several local widgets, such as a to-do list and notes. Each service requires the user to connect their account from that service and specify which workspace from that service should be used. From then on, whenever they open UniDeck, they can see all the important information from that service, such as any updates to a certain project's pull requests or issues on GitHub, or what issues have been created on their Jira workspace.

UniDeck uses a combination of modern tools and techniques to solve several important problems that prevented such a tool from existing before this.

Tech Stack

Handling all the widgets means juggling several logic-heavy components in custom arrangements and load orders. At first, we tried to implement our custom request management solution, but it quickly became apparent that managing the order of the requests and caching would be too complex and too time-consuming. Switching to Tanstack's amazing query library removed a lot of the hassle in this area. Using tanstack query allowed us to only focus on each widget's logic, and the library would manage how the requests are executed, cached, stored, and what data needs to be refreshed when the user visits our website again.

Another example is connecting all the different services and managing their state, which requires a combination of various tools and libraries. Connecting everything and having them work in different combinations would be difficult to manage, except that Nest.js allowed us to have a bunch of modules available to be injected for use in these services.

Product Hunt Launch

We launched an alpha version of UniDeck at the start of 2025 to gauge interest and as it turns out, we were not the only team facing this problem. as we became the second product of the day, we decided to move our focus to UniDeck and work on it a lot more, polishing everything, adding more features and fixing a lot of bugs. We added advanced widgets to allow power users to connect any api we haven't gotten to, especially connecting to their own services, and have tables and charts for easy use without the need for configuring a bunch of complex services. We also laid the groundwork for creating a widget marketplace so that in the future, anyone can create a widget and allow other users to use it.

With all of these fixes, we launched our beta version on July 2nd, 2025, and received a lot of nice reviews and new users.

We are proud to have created a unique product that piqued the interest of so many people and companies around the world, and we are excited to work even more on UniDeck!

You can check out the UniDeck website and try it out for yourself.