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Baserow.io – Self-hosted Airtable alternative

802 points by punnerud 6y ago

FPGAhacker 6y ago
“Eerly premium” should be “Early premium” on the front page.
- ochronus 6y ago
  Or “eerily premium”
- bram2w 6y ago
  Thank you for notifying me of that typo. We will update that soon :).
agustif 6y ago
Looks promising will try out. Glad to see competition in the space.
high_byte 6y ago
Self hosted Always free I like that pricing model
- jeffgreco 6y ago
  Though they’re already laying the groundwork for “premium” features like admin tools, role based permissions, kanban and calendar views which would be paid subscriptions for self-hosted options too. I always worry that essential features for tools like these will get bumped into one of those paid tiers.
  - toomuchtodo 6y ago
    The benefit of having the self hosted always free option is your data isn’t locked into the service. Price is important, but data sovereignty more so imho. If a vendor is no longer meeting your needs, or the deal becomes less fair (you know the whole “raising prices once your business relies on them”), you can export and bounce. More of this chef kiss
    - high_byte 6y ago
      exactly. I get the point that corporations tend to "extort" users by offering supposedly-core features only under premium, but on the other hand this one is a startup and gotta make ends meet somehow. so far I'm fine with that
    - clusterfish 6y ago
      Right... That's why the vast majority of people using self hosted open source don't pay for it. It's about the money for most people. You can export and bounce from airtable too, you know. Even when the service itself does not provide easy export there's often a free third party tool or browser extension to enable data export.
  - boomskats 6y ago
    In their defense, their upcoming 'premium' features are clearly labelled on the Feature Roadmap. I really like that. Great job OP!
tmpz22 6y ago
Gorgeous landing page. Is it a template or did you handroll that? Kudos either way.
- bram2w 6y ago
  Thanks! It is not a template, I designed it from scratch.
  - rochak 6y ago
    That's impressive. Baserow feels like a labor of love. Will definitely try contributing.
rvz 6y ago
Good. We really need more self-hosted open source alternatives like Baserow.
- high_byte 6y ago
  Open-SaaS!
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - nine_k 6y ago
    Does "SaaS" read as "Self as a Service"?
    - high_byte 6y ago
      It's both open-source and software-as-a-service if service is required. but it's still open-source if you just want to self host. I see people did not get that.
chaps 6y ago
Can who's who's used this share their experiences with this? Sounds interesting, but it's going to be a hard sell for collaboration work with airtable already.. on the table.
iampims 6y ago
The documentation is excellent. It’s so rare to see such well written documentation with just the right learning curve.
bram2w 6y ago
Hello everyone, I am Bram Wiepjes, the founder of Baserow. Baserow is an open source, soon to be open core, no-code database tool and Airtable alternative. Easily create your own relational database in a user friendly way without technical experience. - Unlimited rows. - Released under the MIT license. - Uses popular frameworks like Django and Vue.js. - Uses PostgreSQL as database backend. - It can be self hosted. - Designed to be performant with lots of data, handles 100k+ rows per table easily. - Headless and API first. - Supports plugins. If you have experience with Django and Vue.js, we are hiring full stack developers. More info: https://baserow.io/jobs/experienced-full-stack-developer https://baserow.io/jobs/experienced-full-stack-developer Repository: https://gitlab.com/bramw/baserow https://gitlab.com/bramw/baserow
- kennydude 6y ago
  Nice to see this using Django and VueJS! :D
- mekster 6y ago
  Any plan for proper mobile support? Couldn't find a ticket on GitLab.
- sequoia 6y ago
  > € 4,00 per user / month In the USA and I think all English speaking places we use dot rather than comma to separate decimals from whole number, and comma for thousands, millions etc. So at a glance (before looking closely) this looks like four thousand euros per user per month. I looked a second time and realized that was incorrect but consider fixing for EN- 4K/user/mo is quite shocking to read! :)
  - presentation 6y ago
    better use the user's browser locale + Intl to format the currency for you :)
    - chrismorgan 6y ago
      Easier and better to just omit the decimal part: €4 per user per month.
artemonster 6y ago
What is the market for that? What can it do that good ol excel cannot (or, if so really desired, ms access)
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- 40four 6y ago
  Well, among the many answers you might get to this question, the one that sticks out the most to me is Excel spreadsheets do not have a built in REST API and Websocket service out of the box. Sure you can pay up for Access or Sharepoint, or whatever offerings Microsoft has that do give REST APIs (I’m honestly not familiar with them). But this is free and open source, and anyone can put it on a web server and start jamming :)
- mekster 6y ago
  I really never like selling my data to third parties. I usually don't consider using online services unless there's absolutely no good alternatives.
OmegaPG 6y ago
If I use the self hosted software now, how to keep it up to date? Also if they start charging, how will it be different than AirTable? I get the privacy aspect of self hosted solutions but there is a huge overhead cost of maintaining it and updating it. I am not even sure self hosted is safer than SaaS.
- bram2w 6y ago
  It depends a little bit on how you are going self host it. There are updating instructions at the bottom of https://baserow.io/docs/guides/installation/install-on-ubuntu https://baserow.io/docs/guides/installation/install-on-ubunt... and https://baserow.io/docs/guides/installation/install-on-cloudron https://baserow.io/docs/guides/installation/install-on-cloud... We are going to make it much easier to self host and update in the future.
  - zwayhowder 6y ago
    You lost me when there wasn't a docker image. I'd strongly encourage having one that can be dropped into a docker-compose config.
    - bram2w 6y ago
      There are going to be production ready Docker images soon.
      - zwayhowder 6y ago
        Oh look they appeared. https://baserow.io/docs/guides/demo-environment https://baserow.io/docs/guides/demo-environment Thank you!
- vineyardmike 6y ago
  You know (probably) that the binary you download and self host will always run. You can avoid updates, and avoid future paid requirements too. It’s more work, but if you host something on LAN you eschew many security concerns. You can more easily track what it’s pinging and who it talks to. If it’s open source, you can audit and adjust the code too. It’s all about priorities.
johnchristopher 6y ago
A few years ago there were many Airtables articles on HN and it seemed to me it was promoted as a table/database management of some sort for non-technical people. But now I see Airtable is used a lot in marketing departments and I caught a glimpse of a screen the other day and my marketing colleague's Airtable dashboard looked like a mix between Trello and messaging. Can someone explain to me how Airtable is being used by non-technical people ? And can Baserow fill that role too or is it a database thingy first and foremost ? edit: does it have anything to do with templates ?
- wodenokoto 6y ago
  The MMX cad team, is keeping track of some 10.000 parts used in a marble machine instrument being build by Swedish musician Martin Molin. You can see some clips at the linked timestamp where they use air table. Looks really cool. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYFdNwXXcac&t=782s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYFdNwXXcac&t=782s
  - tylermenezes 6y ago
    It does a lot more, now, too! We're even tracking all the community suggestions and ideas made in Discord in Airtable now.
- eightysixfour 6y ago
  With regards to the airtable question, it has the potential to replace almost any CRUD app in a company. Internally we needed to drastically extend our ERP implementation to handle a large custom project and instead of dedicating a dev team to working on it we were able to build the needs out in airtable and then add a few API hooks here and there to the ERP. It was a great success and probably took 1/20th the time since the people that needed to use it were moderately technical and could define and build the workflow as they went. Now less technical people are being onboarded onto it which has, for the most part, worked well. I think the growth areas are going to come from things like stacker.app that make it easier to wrap Airtable databases up in a simple UI. In general, you can think of it like a better realized version of Access, it brings relational databases into an Excel like view that semi-technical people can understand, then wraps it up with a few excellent built-in views like a kanban board, a simple form, and a calendar that non-technical people can understand. It has definite limitations but an easy to use API to expand upon it when you need it. I'm really bullish on it after the project and have moved a bunch of personal stuff that was using external services onto a single airtable instance (contact management/CRM, personal project tracking, etc.)
jerrygoyal 6y ago
nice project.. Will add it to my open-source alternatives list gourav.io/clone-wars ps: any particular reason for not choosing GitHub?
mhd 6y ago
How good is it at recreating the DabbleDB demo? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wZmYMWKLkY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wZmYMWKLkY
- faichai 6y ago
  DabbleDB was way ahead of its time.
  - mhd 6y ago
    Yup, and it was built in an interesting way, if I remember correctly. Using the continuation-based Smalltalk Seaside framework.
    - bfm 6y ago
      A quote by Avi Bryant regarding continuations in Drabble DB "... in Dabble we essentially don't use continuations although we do use Seaside" You can read the whole interview on https://www.infoq.com/interviews/bryant-smalltalk-dabbledb/ https://www.infoq.com/interviews/bryant-smalltalk-dabbledb/
- samblr 6y ago
  Looks like Airtable took a lot of 'inspiration' from DabbleDB!
aschampion 6y ago
See also https://seatable.io/ https://seatable.io/
- kennydude 6y ago
  Seatable doesn't appear to be open source, and for some reason the website is incredibly janky on Firefox
  - mekster 6y ago
    Server component seems proprietary but you can easily run it via docker. https://github.com/seatable/seatable#license https://github.com/seatable/seatable#license
- vineyardmike 6y ago
  This is self-hosted but I’m pretty sure it’s not Open Source (or even available source) like Baserow
- mekster 6y ago
  I never see a mention of this even at any of the "awesome" lists but this is really well built and has more features than baserow. Baserow's mobile support is quite poor but Seatable does it very well and I've been using it for several months and love it.
dbrereton 6y ago
There's an interesting trend of open source clones of popular products. Most recent one that comes to mind is Athens [0] which is an open source clone of Roam Research. The business model is always that people who really want it for free can self host, and people who don't want to deal with the hassle will pay for hosting. Seems like a reasonable strategy to me. [0] https://github.com/athensresearch/athens https://github.com/athensresearch/athens
- sevencolors 6y ago
  I think it's a smart way to make money with open-source projects. Charge for hosting and premium add-ons. For me Gatsby comes to mind. The framework will always be free but they have a build, CI and hosting platform that makes it easy. And i don't mind paying money for.
  - tjbiddle 6y ago
    Plus, some occasional free development from PRs. The number of times where I would be HAPPY to work on a project for free to fix an issue or add a feature I want - I couldn't count. Instead, it's always reaching out to support and "Thanks for your feature request - it's not currently on our road map, but I've added it to our list."
  - piggybox 6y ago
    Open source as a marketing tool
- zwayhowder 6y ago
  I work at a university, we are legally not allowed to host a lot of our data outside of our country. While I'd love to use tools like Airtable & Roam we can't. As those vendors aren't interested in hosting in a small backwater country like Australia </sarcasm> an open source alternative I can host myself is amazing. But I'd gladly pay more to have someone else manage hosting...
- travisjungroth 6y ago
  I wonder if there’s a business model of paid hosting of other companies open source alternatives...
I_am_tiberius 6y ago
Open source is great. But it's hard for me welcoming something that is almost a 1:1 copy of a concept that somebody else worked on for many years.
- treve 6y ago
  You mean things like Linux, LibreOffice, Any browser? The things that they are copying are themselves also copies of earlier products. Airtable can be traced back to MS Access, DBase and I'm sure there's even older examples.
  - I_am_tiberius 6y ago
    I just said I'm not welcoming it. But I also distinguish between copying in terms of implementing the same protocol/standard and copying an innovative product that is unique (or was unique when it came out). I don't think in this discussion there is a right or wrong but I think that if you put 10 years of thinking into a concept and another person just copies it it's just not fair.
    - tthun 6y ago
      Low-code database builders have been around for a long time , Airtable did not come up with this concept, just a slick UX/ implementation of one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HCL_Domino https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HCL_Domino
showerst 6y ago
FYI if anyone from baserow is reading this, I tried following your docs at https://baserow.io/docs/guides%2Fdemo-environment https://baserow.io/docs/guides%2Fdemo-environment and can't clone your git repo -- I'm getting permission denied. Once I looked up the HTTP url it worked fine, so I think you may have a permissions issue in gitlab.
- bram2w 6y ago
  Thanks for notifying me. I was not aware that it is not possible to clone the repo that way without being signed into GitLab. I will change the url in the docs to `https://gitlab.com/bramw/baserow.git https://gitlab.com/bramw/baserow.git`.
  - showerst 6y ago
    No problem! FYI the rest of the demo worked fine, pretty slick!
jsilence 6y ago
+1 for excellent Cloudron support!
chrisblackwell 6y ago
I will be using this, and dropping a lot of my paid AirTable bases...and let me please explain why. Airtable makes it VERY hard to collaborate with people outside my organization. We are a team of 7 people. No longer a scrappy 1-person startup, but not an enterprise client by any-means. If I want to add a single person to an Airtable base, that's $24 a month please. I have one client with 12 people that want to collaborate on the base by posting comments. I can't justify $288 a month just to keep the comments for all time.I contacted Airtable about this and was told the "Enterprise Plan" would be a perfect fit. Minimum $15k a year commitment. Why is this happening in the SasS world??? Everyone seems to be either single Pro user, or Enterprise. Do they really think there is nothing in-between?
- donmcronald 6y ago
  > Everyone seems to be either single Pro user, or Enterprise. Do they really think there is nothing in-between? Just like GitLab. If you have users that might post one or two issues a year you have to pay for them at dev level prices. $240 / year for idle users that barely participate? No thanks. And they have the same tone deaf solution; upgrade to Ultimate. Silicon Valley SaaS bros have lost touch with reality because they have unlimited money to work with.
  - ShakataGaNai 6y ago
    Ah $240/year, I wish it were that cheap. If you want the security goodies is $1200/year/user. You have to make the impossible choice of getting everyone involved with the tool, or getting all the features. Because you can't afford the features AND the users.
  - Swizec 6y ago
    > Silicon Valley SaaS bros have lost touch with reality because they have unlimited money to work with. Disagree. The issue is that they don’t want cheap users. It lowers your average user value, impacts your valuation, and usually cheap users are the most demanding to support in relation to their revenue. A user that pays $50/year and has 5 questions to support us very different than 5 questions from a user posting $5000/year
Exuma 6y ago
Hourglass on pricing tables makes no sense. I'm not a moron and after scanning the page I have no idea what this means... the only thing I can assume is some kind of feature not ready for production yet?
- bram2w 6y ago
  It means that those features have not been created. I agree with you that it has to clearer. We will add a small description what the hourglass icon means soon.
  - Exuma 6y ago
    I would just write "coming soon" and make it very clear. a tiny legend is going to be only marginally better, when it should be clear at the expense of slightly fancy looking.
    - mikeg8 6y ago
      This is good UI advice baserow team.
    - rovr138 6y ago
      And would just add complexity for people using a screen reader.
nojvek 6y ago
Something that would be really cool is if there was an open source - self hosted version of notion.so. I like notion because it’s a hybrid of wiki, table/database, calendar, kanban. You can do a lot more than just tables.
- bobbylarrybobby 6y ago
  Check out anytype.io
- bram2w 6y ago
  We are going to add Notion like features to Baserow in 2022. You should then be able to create similar documents within the same tool and it is going to work well together with the databases and tables that you already have.
- hypermachine 6y ago
  You can try us out when we launch, though for us it is more "assemble your own Notion tool like Lego" rather than an out-of-the-box Notion clone.
- gustavohoa 6y ago
  This sounds a lot like getoutline.com
decentrality 6y ago
Had me at "self-hosted" Following the repository now, and tried an online demo account. Looks promising but now quite ready. Will be switching from Airtable when: 1. More field formats are supported ( like Currency, Collaborators, Multiselect ) 2. Kanban views are supported 3. Automations are supported
garduque 6y ago
I love Airtable but not the monthly invoice that comes with it. Signed up for your email newsletter so please do remind me when you get further along. Things like csv export and all of the pending field types are a necessity before I could even consider switching even my most basic bases.
juliend2 6y ago
This is very cool. I love airtable and I'm pretty sure I will install Baserow soon just to try it out. Shameless plug: I just did a quick blog post listing that kind of products open source alternatives: https://www.juliendesrosiers.com/2021/03/13/open-source-self-hosted-saas-alternatives.php https://www.juliendesrosiers.com/2021/03/13/open-source-self... It's becoming more common these days to see serious businesses go open source from the start and gaining significant traction. Like Plausible, Gitlab, Bitwarden, etc.
- mekster 6y ago
  Plausible looks way too simple to be GA alternative.
thedays 6y ago
Looks great. I suggest you get rid of the decimal point and two decimals in the pricing so it’s simpler to understand, especially for people outside Europe that use commas in numbers differently. €4 per user / month is much easier to read and understand for most people than € 4,00 per user / month The comma made it look a bit odd and like €400 initially when I glanced at it and it just seems like an unnecessary level of precision to include the two decimal points when they are both zero anyway.
- remram 6y ago
  "From € 1.000 p/m" is even worse. I was not even aware of any locale using ',' for decimals and '.' for thousands.
  - Kiro 6y ago
    Probably German.
    - gog 6y ago
      Majority of European countries use a decimal comma.
      - cornzsty 6y ago
        Finns use a space. It's best to use some library, built-in or otherwise to make sure it's the correct one.
      - remram 6y ago
        I'm French, where we use a comma for decimals, but a space for thousands.
- sickmate 6y ago
  A perfect use case for Number.prototype.toLocaleString. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Number/toLocaleString https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...
jsilence 6y ago
I'm really fond of retool. Is Baserow aimed in the same direction? That would be absolutely great! Here's a 4min demo video of retool: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkcwNwPy7RI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkcwNwPy7RI
- ericcholis 6y ago
  I think retool is so much more than Baserow. You could conceivably build an entire CRM in retool. Or, flesh out a headless API with an interface in retool.
mrfusion 6y ago
This seems ideal for a FOSS project.
decentrality 6y ago
One great way to get this into the mainstream would likely be to clone and adapt `feathers.js` support for `Airtable`: https://github.com/jonascript/feathers-airtable https://github.com/jonascript/feathers-airtable
rnapoles 6y ago
Hi nice job, If you could integrate OAuth2 into it, it would be quite comfortable. I hate having to register manually.
tylermenezes 6y ago
I am so excited for this software. I have used Airtable extensively, and it's a pile of garbage. Here are just a FEW of the "features" Airtable charges $24/user/mo for: - Reliable 1-5 hours a month of downtime. There are months where it's literally 1 nine of uptime. Their status page was actually down for a while (I think they forgot to renew it?) - Simple and obvious bugs in the official API clients have not been fixed for years (for example, Promises in the official JS library throw the string `[object Object]` for all exceptions.) - The API has no way to query the structure of a table, you have to infer it from the first few records. (The auto-generated API documentation is actually wrong if you don't have a fully-filled-in row somewhere in the first few rows.) - You can't modify a table configuration by API... except you can _sometimes_ by adding a parameter which is documented to try to convert dates, but actually modifies field definitions for a number of fields. Documentation for which fields is entirely in scattered forum posts from users. - Booleans in the API are `true` or `undefined`. Seriously. This is all /barely/ worth it because Google Docs doesn't work when you need a large structured database with many collaborators. But man is it bad software.
- grioghar 6y ago
  I’m so glad it’s not just me. I have been unimpressed with the over-complication and the...lacking API.
- elwell 6y ago
  I agree that Airtable is expensive, but I've found their custom app development experience to be quite nice.
- tthun 6y ago
  Try force.com (fully featured developer account is free with limits), very stable and fully featured PaaS with long tail of features. On a quick review Airtable as a slick/modern UX on less sound architecture than force.com, probably shipping features in a breakneck pace.
  - andrenotgiant 6y ago
    salesforce.com? can't tell if you're making a joke, recommending SalesForce, or there's another company called force with a different TLD.
elwell 6y ago
After trying it out, this is unabashedly a clone of Airtable, but I couldn't find any apps/add-ons (yet?). To me, the apps, automations, and ability to create custom apps are what make Airtable so powerful. I did see mention of support for third-party plugins on the info site, but not when I tested it out; too early I guess.
- gervwyk 6y ago
  A nice API might be all that you need. That and maybe something like https://lowdefy.com https://lowdefy.com to easily put a UI in front of it.
f430 6y ago
What does airtable do that excel can't? curious as to what makes airtable appealing and where this self hosted has advantages
abinaya_rl 6y ago
I just literally searched for Web GUI client for Postgres and I was going through the Google Search results. Just in time noticed this awesome tool came up in HN. Really great man. I would like to become a paid customer once it's live.
- steve_taylor 6y ago
  Did you come across BaseDash? It was announced on HN a few months ago. https://www.basedash.com/ https://www.basedash.com/
tomerbd 6y ago
What is the benefit of using such a solution rather than a standard database like sqlite or posgresql perhaps with some automatic api on top?
- mekster 6y ago
  So, you ask your designers and managers to check data through phpMyAdmin and let them edit there? Even by myself as a developer, I handle my to-do list with Seatable and apparently, using a raw db isn't comfortable at all. That's some poor imagination.
mjthompson 6y ago
MIT licence? Haven't they learned from others' mistakes? This sort of stuff should be AGPL licenced.
ybalkind 6y ago
Another alternative (not self-hosted or open source) is Fibery.io More powerful than Airtable, and has some Notion-like capabilities.
ricklamers 6y ago
I really like this trend of self hosted apps that make it possible to avoid shipping sensitive data to third parties. Baserow looks so polished, very impressive for such an early stage project. Loved how easy it was to get the auto generated API working too!
steQ 6y ago
Self hosted and open source alternative is https://directus.io/ https://directus.io/ They switch from PHP to Node recently
igammarays 6y ago
As a person who literally works on the Airtable API for a living, and founded an Airtable-based startup, I knew this was coming. Airtable deserves to be replaced by a good open-source alternative, for the way they've treated their customers. They built a great product that people love, and then made the pricing inaccessible to small business, ignored the API for years (I've been developing on top of the API since 2015, barely any improvements since then), piled on shit that no one asked for (Apps/Blocks) instead of working on the API that everyone asked for, made certain essential features like the metadata API invite-only, and are generally self-centered and obnoxious in their messaging (just see their blog post describing the launch of Airtable Blocks/Apps - "A half billion apps are about to be created.") Yes, those half-billion apps on top of Airtable will be made, but not on the original Airtable platform, because they've closed their software down and made interoperability a pain, and hid basic features like apps and record colouring behind a paywall. Meanwhile, they don't know how to build an app that can handle more than 50,000 rows and there are feature-request threads that are literally years old. LISTEN TO YOUR CUSTOMERS, dammit. Airtable could've easily been the next Excel if they had just not been so tight-fisted, protective, greedy and aloof. There are plenty ways to monetize such a great product if they had just allowed people to use it. I have a feeling like their leadership was inspired by Steve Jobs, but they blindly applied Apple-esque walled garden philosophies to a domain where it makes no sense, because no one can actually use a cloud product without a proper API (operating systems are a different story). I complain even though my life literally depends on Airtable. Shameless plug: I'm the founder of Fintable.io, a bootstrapped startup that syncs your bank accounts to Airtable, and I have no other source of income. I love Airtable, but I'm just sick and tired of their shitty castrated API that can't even stay up reliably. Maybe this is the trigger that will cause somebody over there to wake up, because it isn't too late for Airtable to win at this game (and I hope they do).
revskill 6y ago
The core of a sustainable software to me is in the ORM layer. This is where Ruby on Rails or similar framework failed terribly. One classic example is: How do your ORM/libraries provide you tool to define a calculable "name" field, which is equal to "firstName + lastName", with option to store it as a database field ?
aszen 6y ago
Is there any application that provides similar features but can be integrated into an existing web application. We want our users to be able to do similar things for their internal reporting within our own application. The kind of integration I'm looking for is an iframe embedded into the application ui and APIs for readily accessing common data
dehugger 6y ago
I loaded up the demo and am impressed with what you'e achieved. However I cannot find any way to add column restraints, or mention of how to do so in any of the documentation. Is there really no way to mark a column as "not null" or make a unique id that auto generates, or say a date column that gets set on insert? I don't think these are very advanced features to ask of a SQL database and am confused why they appear to be missing.

802 points by punnerud 6y ago

FPGAhacker 6y ago

“Eerly premium” should be “Early premium” on the front page.

ochronus 6y ago
Or “eerily premium”
bram2w 6y ago
Thank you for notifying me of that typo. We will update that soon :).

agustif 6y ago

Looks promising will try out. Glad to see competition in the space.

high_byte 6y ago

Self hosted Always free I like that pricing model

jeffgreco 6y ago
Though they’re already laying the groundwork for “premium” features like admin tools, role based permissions, kanban and calendar views which would be paid subscriptions for self-hosted options too. I always worry that essential features for tools like these will get bumped into one of those paid tiers.
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  The benefit of having the self hosted always free option is your data isn’t locked into the service. Price is important, but data sovereignty more so imho. If a vendor is no longer meeting your needs, or the deal becomes less fair (you know the whole “raising prices once your business relies on them”), you can export and bounce. More of this chef kiss
  - high_byte 6y ago
    exactly. I get the point that corporations tend to "extort" users by offering supposedly-core features only under premium, but on the other hand this one is a startup and gotta make ends meet somehow. so far I'm fine with that
  - clusterfish 6y ago
    Right... That's why the vast majority of people using self hosted open source don't pay for it. It's about the money for most people. You can export and bounce from airtable too, you know. Even when the service itself does not provide easy export there's often a free third party tool or browser extension to enable data export.
- boomskats 6y ago
  In their defense, their upcoming 'premium' features are clearly labelled on the Feature Roadmap. I really like that. Great job OP!

tmpz22 6y ago

Gorgeous landing page. Is it a template or did you handroll that? Kudos either way.

bram2w 6y ago
Thanks! It is not a template, I designed it from scratch.
- rochak 6y ago
  That's impressive. Baserow feels like a labor of love. Will definitely try contributing.

rvz 6y ago

Good. We really need more self-hosted open source alternatives like Baserow.

high_byte 6y ago
Open-SaaS!
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- nine_k 6y ago
  Does "SaaS" read as "Self as a Service"?
  - high_byte 6y ago
    It's both open-source and software-as-a-service if service is required. but it's still open-source if you just want to self host. I see people did not get that.

chaps 6y ago

Can who's who's used this share their experiences with this? Sounds interesting, but it's going to be a hard sell for collaboration work with airtable already.. on the table.

iampims 6y ago

The documentation is excellent. It’s so rare to see such well written documentation with just the right learning curve.

bram2w 6y ago

Hello everyone, I am Bram Wiepjes, the founder of Baserow. Baserow is an open source, soon to be open core, no-code database tool and Airtable alternative. Easily create your own relational database in a user friendly way without technical experience. - Unlimited rows. - Released under the MIT license. - Uses popular frameworks like Django and Vue.js. - Uses PostgreSQL as database backend. - It can be self hosted. - Designed to be performant with lots of data, handles 100k+ rows per table easily. - Headless and API first. - Supports plugins. If you have experience with Django and Vue.js, we are hiring full stack developers. More info: https://baserow.io/jobs/experienced-full-stack-developer https://baserow.io/jobs/experienced-full-stack-developer Repository: https://gitlab.com/bramw/baserow https://gitlab.com/bramw/baserow

kennydude 6y ago
Nice to see this using Django and VueJS! :D
mekster 6y ago
Any plan for proper mobile support? Couldn't find a ticket on GitLab.
sequoia 6y ago
> € 4,00 per user / month In the USA and I think all English speaking places we use dot rather than comma to separate decimals from whole number, and comma for thousands, millions etc. So at a glance (before looking closely) this looks like four thousand euros per user per month. I looked a second time and realized that was incorrect but consider fixing for EN- 4K/user/mo is quite shocking to read! :)
- presentation 6y ago
  better use the user's browser locale + Intl to format the currency for you :)
  - chrismorgan 6y ago
    Easier and better to just omit the decimal part: €4 per user per month.

artemonster 6y ago

What is the market for that? What can it do that good ol excel cannot (or, if so really desired, ms access)

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
40four 6y ago
Well, among the many answers you might get to this question, the one that sticks out the most to me is Excel spreadsheets do not have a built in REST API and Websocket service out of the box. Sure you can pay up for Access or Sharepoint, or whatever offerings Microsoft has that do give REST APIs (I’m honestly not familiar with them). But this is free and open source, and anyone can put it on a web server and start jamming :)
mekster 6y ago
I really never like selling my data to third parties. I usually don't consider using online services unless there's absolutely no good alternatives.

OmegaPG 6y ago

If I use the self hosted software now, how to keep it up to date? Also if they start charging, how will it be different than AirTable? I get the privacy aspect of self hosted solutions but there is a huge overhead cost of maintaining it and updating it. I am not even sure self hosted is safer than SaaS.

bram2w 6y ago
It depends a little bit on how you are going self host it. There are updating instructions at the bottom of https://baserow.io/docs/guides/installation/install-on-ubuntu https://baserow.io/docs/guides/installation/install-on-ubunt... and https://baserow.io/docs/guides/installation/install-on-cloudron https://baserow.io/docs/guides/installation/install-on-cloud... We are going to make it much easier to self host and update in the future.
- zwayhowder 6y ago
  You lost me when there wasn't a docker image. I'd strongly encourage having one that can be dropped into a docker-compose config.
  - bram2w 6y ago
    There are going to be production ready Docker images soon.
    - zwayhowder 6y ago
      Oh look they appeared. https://baserow.io/docs/guides/demo-environment https://baserow.io/docs/guides/demo-environment Thank you!
vineyardmike 6y ago
You know (probably) that the binary you download and self host will always run. You can avoid updates, and avoid future paid requirements too. It’s more work, but if you host something on LAN you eschew many security concerns. You can more easily track what it’s pinging and who it talks to. If it’s open source, you can audit and adjust the code too. It’s all about priorities.

johnchristopher 6y ago

A few years ago there were many Airtables articles on HN and it seemed to me it was promoted as a table/database management of some sort for non-technical people. But now I see Airtable is used a lot in marketing departments and I caught a glimpse of a screen the other day and my marketing colleague's Airtable dashboard looked like a mix between Trello and messaging. Can someone explain to me how Airtable is being used by non-technical people ? And can Baserow fill that role too or is it a database thingy first and foremost ? edit: does it have anything to do with templates ?

wodenokoto 6y ago
The MMX cad team, is keeping track of some 10.000 parts used in a marble machine instrument being build by Swedish musician Martin Molin. You can see some clips at the linked timestamp where they use air table. Looks really cool. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYFdNwXXcac&t=782s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYFdNwXXcac&t=782s
- tylermenezes 6y ago
  It does a lot more, now, too! We're even tracking all the community suggestions and ideas made in Discord in Airtable now.
eightysixfour 6y ago
With regards to the airtable question, it has the potential to replace almost any CRUD app in a company. Internally we needed to drastically extend our ERP implementation to handle a large custom project and instead of dedicating a dev team to working on it we were able to build the needs out in airtable and then add a few API hooks here and there to the ERP. It was a great success and probably took 1/20th the time since the people that needed to use it were moderately technical and could define and build the workflow as they went. Now less technical people are being onboarded onto it which has, for the most part, worked well. I think the growth areas are going to come from things like stacker.app that make it easier to wrap Airtable databases up in a simple UI. In general, you can think of it like a better realized version of Access, it brings relational databases into an Excel like view that semi-technical people can understand, then wraps it up with a few excellent built-in views like a kanban board, a simple form, and a calendar that non-technical people can understand. It has definite limitations but an easy to use API to expand upon it when you need it. I'm really bullish on it after the project and have moved a bunch of personal stuff that was using external services onto a single airtable instance (contact management/CRM, personal project tracking, etc.)

jerrygoyal 6y ago

nice project.. Will add it to my open-source alternatives list gourav.io/clone-wars ps: any particular reason for not choosing GitHub?

mhd 6y ago

How good is it at recreating the DabbleDB demo? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wZmYMWKLkY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wZmYMWKLkY

faichai 6y ago
DabbleDB was way ahead of its time.
- mhd 6y ago
  Yup, and it was built in an interesting way, if I remember correctly. Using the continuation-based Smalltalk Seaside framework.
  - bfm 6y ago
    A quote by Avi Bryant regarding continuations in Drabble DB "... in Dabble we essentially don't use continuations although we do use Seaside" You can read the whole interview on https://www.infoq.com/interviews/bryant-smalltalk-dabbledb/ https://www.infoq.com/interviews/bryant-smalltalk-dabbledb/
samblr 6y ago
Looks like Airtable took a lot of 'inspiration' from DabbleDB!

aschampion 6y ago

See also https://seatable.io/ https://seatable.io/

kennydude 6y ago
Seatable doesn't appear to be open source, and for some reason the website is incredibly janky on Firefox
- mekster 6y ago
  Server component seems proprietary but you can easily run it via docker. https://github.com/seatable/seatable#license https://github.com/seatable/seatable#license
vineyardmike 6y ago
This is self-hosted but I’m pretty sure it’s not Open Source (or even available source) like Baserow
mekster 6y ago
I never see a mention of this even at any of the "awesome" lists but this is really well built and has more features than baserow. Baserow's mobile support is quite poor but Seatable does it very well and I've been using it for several months and love it.

dbrereton 6y ago

There's an interesting trend of open source clones of popular products. Most recent one that comes to mind is Athens [0] which is an open source clone of Roam Research. The business model is always that people who really want it for free can self host, and people who don't want to deal with the hassle will pay for hosting. Seems like a reasonable strategy to me. [0] https://github.com/athensresearch/athens https://github.com/athensresearch/athens

sevencolors 6y ago
I think it's a smart way to make money with open-source projects. Charge for hosting and premium add-ons. For me Gatsby comes to mind. The framework will always be free but they have a build, CI and hosting platform that makes it easy. And i don't mind paying money for.
- tjbiddle 6y ago
  Plus, some occasional free development from PRs. The number of times where I would be HAPPY to work on a project for free to fix an issue or add a feature I want - I couldn't count. Instead, it's always reaching out to support and "Thanks for your feature request - it's not currently on our road map, but I've added it to our list."
- piggybox 6y ago
  Open source as a marketing tool
zwayhowder 6y ago
I work at a university, we are legally not allowed to host a lot of our data outside of our country. While I'd love to use tools like Airtable & Roam we can't. As those vendors aren't interested in hosting in a small backwater country like Australia </sarcasm> an open source alternative I can host myself is amazing. But I'd gladly pay more to have someone else manage hosting...
travisjungroth 6y ago
I wonder if there’s a business model of paid hosting of other companies open source alternatives...

I_am_tiberius 6y ago

Open source is great. But it's hard for me welcoming something that is almost a 1:1 copy of a concept that somebody else worked on for many years.

treve 6y ago
You mean things like Linux, LibreOffice, Any browser? The things that they are copying are themselves also copies of earlier products. Airtable can be traced back to MS Access, DBase and I'm sure there's even older examples.
- I_am_tiberius 6y ago
  I just said I'm not welcoming it. But I also distinguish between copying in terms of implementing the same protocol/standard and copying an innovative product that is unique (or was unique when it came out). I don't think in this discussion there is a right or wrong but I think that if you put 10 years of thinking into a concept and another person just copies it it's just not fair.
  - tthun 6y ago
    Low-code database builders have been around for a long time , Airtable did not come up with this concept, just a slick UX/ implementation of one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HCL_Domino https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HCL_Domino

showerst 6y ago

FYI if anyone from baserow is reading this, I tried following your docs at https://baserow.io/docs/guides%2Fdemo-environment https://baserow.io/docs/guides%2Fdemo-environment and can't clone your git repo -- I'm getting permission denied. Once I looked up the HTTP url it worked fine, so I think you may have a permissions issue in gitlab.

bram2w 6y ago
Thanks for notifying me. I was not aware that it is not possible to clone the repo that way without being signed into GitLab. I will change the url in the docs to `https://gitlab.com/bramw/baserow.git https://gitlab.com/bramw/baserow.git`.
- showerst 6y ago
  No problem! FYI the rest of the demo worked fine, pretty slick!

jsilence 6y ago

+1 for excellent Cloudron support!

chrisblackwell 6y ago

I will be using this, and dropping a lot of my paid AirTable bases...and let me please explain why. Airtable makes it VERY hard to collaborate with people outside my organization. We are a team of 7 people. No longer a scrappy 1-person startup, but not an enterprise client by any-means. If I want to add a single person to an Airtable base, that's $24 a month please. I have one client with 12 people that want to collaborate on the base by posting comments. I can't justify $288 a month just to keep the comments for all time.I contacted Airtable about this and was told the "Enterprise Plan" would be a perfect fit. Minimum $15k a year commitment. Why is this happening in the SasS world??? Everyone seems to be either single Pro user, or Enterprise. Do they really think there is nothing in-between?

donmcronald 6y ago
> Everyone seems to be either single Pro user, or Enterprise. Do they really think there is nothing in-between? Just like GitLab. If you have users that might post one or two issues a year you have to pay for them at dev level prices. $240 / year for idle users that barely participate? No thanks. And they have the same tone deaf solution; upgrade to Ultimate. Silicon Valley SaaS bros have lost touch with reality because they have unlimited money to work with.
- ShakataGaNai 6y ago
  Ah $240/year, I wish it were that cheap. If you want the security goodies is $1200/year/user. You have to make the impossible choice of getting everyone involved with the tool, or getting all the features. Because you can't afford the features AND the users.
- Swizec 6y ago
  > Silicon Valley SaaS bros have lost touch with reality because they have unlimited money to work with. Disagree. The issue is that they don’t want cheap users. It lowers your average user value, impacts your valuation, and usually cheap users are the most demanding to support in relation to their revenue. A user that pays $50/year and has 5 questions to support us very different than 5 questions from a user posting $5000/year

Exuma 6y ago

Hourglass on pricing tables makes no sense. I'm not a moron and after scanning the page I have no idea what this means... the only thing I can assume is some kind of feature not ready for production yet?

bram2w 6y ago
It means that those features have not been created. I agree with you that it has to clearer. We will add a small description what the hourglass icon means soon.
- Exuma 6y ago
  I would just write "coming soon" and make it very clear. a tiny legend is going to be only marginally better, when it should be clear at the expense of slightly fancy looking.
  - mikeg8 6y ago
    This is good UI advice baserow team.
  - rovr138 6y ago
    And would just add complexity for people using a screen reader.

nojvek 6y ago

Something that would be really cool is if there was an open source - self hosted version of notion.so. I like notion because it’s a hybrid of wiki, table/database, calendar, kanban. You can do a lot more than just tables.

bobbylarrybobby 6y ago
Check out anytype.io
bram2w 6y ago
We are going to add Notion like features to Baserow in 2022. You should then be able to create similar documents within the same tool and it is going to work well together with the databases and tables that you already have.
hypermachine 6y ago
You can try us out when we launch, though for us it is more "assemble your own Notion tool like Lego" rather than an out-of-the-box Notion clone.
gustavohoa 6y ago
This sounds a lot like getoutline.com

decentrality 6y ago

Had me at "self-hosted" Following the repository now, and tried an online demo account. Looks promising but now quite ready. Will be switching from Airtable when: 1. More field formats are supported ( like Currency, Collaborators, Multiselect ) 2. Kanban views are supported 3. Automations are supported

garduque 6y ago

I love Airtable but not the monthly invoice that comes with it. Signed up for your email newsletter so please do remind me when you get further along. Things like csv export and all of the pending field types are a necessity before I could even consider switching even my most basic bases.

juliend2 6y ago

This is very cool. I love airtable and I'm pretty sure I will install Baserow soon just to try it out. Shameless plug: I just did a quick blog post listing that kind of products open source alternatives: https://www.juliendesrosiers.com/2021/03/13/open-source-self-hosted-saas-alternatives.php https://www.juliendesrosiers.com/2021/03/13/open-source-self... It's becoming more common these days to see serious businesses go open source from the start and gaining significant traction. Like Plausible, Gitlab, Bitwarden, etc.

mekster 6y ago
Plausible looks way too simple to be GA alternative.

thedays 6y ago

Looks great. I suggest you get rid of the decimal point and two decimals in the pricing so it’s simpler to understand, especially for people outside Europe that use commas in numbers differently. €4 per user / month is much easier to read and understand for most people than € 4,00 per user / month The comma made it look a bit odd and like €400 initially when I glanced at it and it just seems like an unnecessary level of precision to include the two decimal points when they are both zero anyway.

remram 6y ago
"From € 1.000 p/m" is even worse. I was not even aware of any locale using ',' for decimals and '.' for thousands.
- Kiro 6y ago
  Probably German.
  - gog 6y ago
    Majority of European countries use a decimal comma.
    - cornzsty 6y ago
      Finns use a space. It's best to use some library, built-in or otherwise to make sure it's the correct one.
    - remram 6y ago
      I'm French, where we use a comma for decimals, but a space for thousands.
sickmate 6y ago
A perfect use case for Number.prototype.toLocaleString. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Number/toLocaleString https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

jsilence 6y ago

I'm really fond of retool. Is Baserow aimed in the same direction? That would be absolutely great! Here's a 4min demo video of retool: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkcwNwPy7RI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkcwNwPy7RI

ericcholis 6y ago
I think retool is so much more than Baserow. You could conceivably build an entire CRM in retool. Or, flesh out a headless API with an interface in retool.

mrfusion 6y ago

This seems ideal for a FOSS project.

decentrality 6y ago

One great way to get this into the mainstream would likely be to clone and adapt `feathers.js` support for `Airtable`: https://github.com/jonascript/feathers-airtable https://github.com/jonascript/feathers-airtable

rnapoles 6y ago

Hi nice job, If you could integrate OAuth2 into it, it would be quite comfortable. I hate having to register manually.

tylermenezes 6y ago

I am so excited for this software. I have used Airtable extensively, and it's a pile of garbage. Here are just a FEW of the "features" Airtable charges $24/user/mo for: - Reliable 1-5 hours a month of downtime. There are months where it's literally 1 nine of uptime. Their status page was actually down for a while (I think they forgot to renew it?) - Simple and obvious bugs in the official API clients have not been fixed for years (for example, Promises in the official JS library throw the string `[object Object]` for all exceptions.) - The API has no way to query the structure of a table, you have to infer it from the first few records. (The auto-generated API documentation is actually wrong if you don't have a fully-filled-in row somewhere in the first few rows.) - You can't modify a table configuration by API... except you can _sometimes_ by adding a parameter which is documented to try to convert dates, but actually modifies field definitions for a number of fields. Documentation for which fields is entirely in scattered forum posts from users. - Booleans in the API are `true` or `undefined`. Seriously. This is all /barely/ worth it because Google Docs doesn't work when you need a large structured database with many collaborators. But man is it bad software.

grioghar 6y ago
I’m so glad it’s not just me. I have been unimpressed with the over-complication and the...lacking API.
elwell 6y ago
I agree that Airtable is expensive, but I've found their custom app development experience to be quite nice.
tthun 6y ago
Try force.com (fully featured developer account is free with limits), very stable and fully featured PaaS with long tail of features. On a quick review Airtable as a slick/modern UX on less sound architecture than force.com, probably shipping features in a breakneck pace.
- andrenotgiant 6y ago
  salesforce.com? can't tell if you're making a joke, recommending SalesForce, or there's another company called force with a different TLD.

elwell 6y ago

After trying it out, this is unabashedly a clone of Airtable, but I couldn't find any apps/add-ons (yet?). To me, the apps, automations, and ability to create custom apps are what make Airtable so powerful. I did see mention of support for third-party plugins on the info site, but not when I tested it out; too early I guess.

gervwyk 6y ago
A nice API might be all that you need. That and maybe something like https://lowdefy.com https://lowdefy.com to easily put a UI in front of it.

f430 6y ago

What does airtable do that excel can't? curious as to what makes airtable appealing and where this self hosted has advantages

abinaya_rl 6y ago

I just literally searched for Web GUI client for Postgres and I was going through the Google Search results. Just in time noticed this awesome tool came up in HN. Really great man. I would like to become a paid customer once it's live.

steve_taylor 6y ago
Did you come across BaseDash? It was announced on HN a few months ago. https://www.basedash.com/ https://www.basedash.com/

tomerbd 6y ago

What is the benefit of using such a solution rather than a standard database like sqlite or posgresql perhaps with some automatic api on top?

mekster 6y ago
So, you ask your designers and managers to check data through phpMyAdmin and let them edit there? Even by myself as a developer, I handle my to-do list with Seatable and apparently, using a raw db isn't comfortable at all. That's some poor imagination.

mjthompson 6y ago

MIT licence? Haven't they learned from others' mistakes? This sort of stuff should be AGPL licenced.

ybalkind 6y ago

Another alternative (not self-hosted or open source) is Fibery.io More powerful than Airtable, and has some Notion-like capabilities.

ricklamers 6y ago

I really like this trend of self hosted apps that make it possible to avoid shipping sensitive data to third parties. Baserow looks so polished, very impressive for such an early stage project. Loved how easy it was to get the auto generated API working too!

steQ 6y ago

Self hosted and open source alternative is https://directus.io/ https://directus.io/ They switch from PHP to Node recently

igammarays 6y ago

As a person who literally works on the Airtable API for a living, and founded an Airtable-based startup, I knew this was coming. Airtable deserves to be replaced by a good open-source alternative, for the way they've treated their customers. They built a great product that people love, and then made the pricing inaccessible to small business, ignored the API for years (I've been developing on top of the API since 2015, barely any improvements since then), piled on shit that no one asked for (Apps/Blocks) instead of working on the API that everyone asked for, made certain essential features like the metadata API invite-only, and are generally self-centered and obnoxious in their messaging (just see their blog post describing the launch of Airtable Blocks/Apps - "A half billion apps are about to be created.") Yes, those half-billion apps on top of Airtable will be made, but not on the original Airtable platform, because they've closed their software down and made interoperability a pain, and hid basic features like apps and record colouring behind a paywall. Meanwhile, they don't know how to build an app that can handle more than 50,000 rows and there are feature-request threads that are literally years old. LISTEN TO YOUR CUSTOMERS, dammit. Airtable could've easily been the next Excel if they had just not been so tight-fisted, protective, greedy and aloof. There are plenty ways to monetize such a great product if they had just allowed people to use it. I have a feeling like their leadership was inspired by Steve Jobs, but they blindly applied Apple-esque walled garden philosophies to a domain where it makes no sense, because no one can actually use a cloud product without a proper API (operating systems are a different story). I complain even though my life literally depends on Airtable. Shameless plug: I'm the founder of Fintable.io, a bootstrapped startup that syncs your bank accounts to Airtable, and I have no other source of income. I love Airtable, but I'm just sick and tired of their shitty castrated API that can't even stay up reliably. Maybe this is the trigger that will cause somebody over there to wake up, because it isn't too late for Airtable to win at this game (and I hope they do).

revskill 6y ago

The core of a sustainable software to me is in the ORM layer. This is where Ruby on Rails or similar framework failed terribly. One classic example is: How do your ORM/libraries provide you tool to define a calculable "name" field, which is equal to "firstName + lastName", with option to store it as a database field ?

aszen 6y ago

Is there any application that provides similar features but can be integrated into an existing web application. We want our users to be able to do similar things for their internal reporting within our own application. The kind of integration I'm looking for is an iframe embedded into the application ui and APIs for readily accessing common data

dehugger 6y ago

I loaded up the demo and am impressed with what you'e achieved. However I cannot find any way to add column restraints, or mention of how to do so in any of the documentation. Is there really no way to mark a column as "not null" or make a unique id that auto generates, or say a date column that gets set on insert? I don't think these are very advanced features to ask of a SQL database and am confused why they appear to be missing.