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Rowy: Open-source Airtable alternative on Google Cloud
- pantulis 5y agoIs this really an Airtable alternative? They seem to describe themselves as a admin frontend for Firebase. Obviously there is some overlap with Airtable, but a web frontend for Firebase is much more interesting to me!
- FirstLvR 5y agoa web frontend for Firebase? sounds too good
- harinijan 5y agoIndeed it is :)
- harinijan 5y agoHi! Yes we are a web frontend for Firebase indeed and so much more. We liked how intuitive collaborating on Airtable was but it is limited in scalability, not synced to your production apps, limited storage, and inability to control access at a granular level. We also that by bringing Airtable-like experience for your Firestore data! Give it a try.
- hardwaresofton 5y agoOthers have already mentioned BaseRow and NocoDB but there’s another entrant in this space: https://firetable.io/ https://firetable.io/ [EDIT] just noticed, Firetable seems to have been productized into Rowy! Site is still up but github project redirects to rowyio/rowy Can someone from AntlerVC talk about the move/reposition? Is someone from the team running with the idea?
- harinijan 5y agoThat's correct, Firetable is now Rowy. We are the original creators of the Firetable open-source project and now rebranded to Rowy with tons of new features added in our latest v2.0 launch. I was the Head of Technology/Global Partner at Antler and I have left recently to build this company. Check out our github: https://github.com/rowyio/rowy https://github.com/rowyio/rowy
- hardwaresofton 5y agoCongratulations on the launch, rowy looks awesome, it was already pretty easy to launch Firetable and it doesn't get much easier than one click.
- artemonster 5y agoI wonder how big is the market for such „airtable clones“?
- A4ET8a8uTh0 5y agoI honestly can't say, but given prevalence of Excel and its well known limitations, I am not sure it is a niche market. Edit: not to poke too many holes, but why is alternative to Google using Firebase.
- artemonster 5y agoSelling „broad“ swissknife-like tools is harder than niche ones, so I am unsure here
- the-dude 5y agoHave you ever tried to convince an Excel user to try something else? How did it go?
- ramraj07 5y agoSlightly different model would be very valuable. Airtables 50k row limit is very annoying and blocks us from even trying.
- harinijan 5y agoYes, Rowy has no limits on rows as it is actually an Airtable-like experience on Firebase database and not a nocode product that doesn't scale. You can go form MVP to scale without any limitations.
- artemonster 5y agoWhat is a use case? I am contemplating a more advanced excel-like app with separated flows for data acquisition (i.e. pulls via api), data management (tables, formulas, slicing) and view (graphing, input forms, buttons). I wonder if there would be a market for that and how to validate such idea…
- 5y ago
- merlinscholz 5y agoThere’s also https://baserow.io/ https://baserow.io/
- desireco42 5y agoBaseRow looks way cooler to me and immediately obvious ie. I know how I would use it. Thanks for posting.
- harinijan 5y agoBaseRow in my understanding is a no-code database very similar to Airtable, however we are building a low-code platform which shows your Firestore database in an Airtable-like experience. Which means no limitations that comes with a no-code platform like scalability, not synced to your production apps, limited storage, and inability to control access at a granular level, feature limitations. With Rowy, you can not just view your Firestore data in Airtable-like UI but also build cloud functions, connect to any third party tool, use NPMs and APIs right in the browser without the hassle of CLIs, terminals or native consoles.
- peterthehacker 5y agoWhat scale have you tested the UI at? Do you have any demo / benchmarks for over 1M rows for example? Reading through the infinite scrolling PR [1] it looks like scrolling isn’t virtualized (like Airtable’s) so the browser will start choking when it has too many elements in the DOM. [1] https://github.com/rowyio/rowy/pull/29 https://github.com/rowyio/rowy/pull/29
- notsidney 5y agoHey, I’m one of the engineers working on Rowy. We use react-data-grid [1], which has built-in support for virtualized lists rendering. They have demo of a table with 1000 rows and the scrolling stays smooth [2] [1] https://github.com/adazzle/react-data-grid/ https://github.com/adazzle/react-data-grid/ [2] https://adazzle.github.io/react-data-grid/#/common-features https://adazzle.github.io/react-data-grid/#/common-features
- yingw787 5y agoThis looks awesome, thanks for building this! I really like how it's hosted on serverless stuff and therefore we can use it for long-running personal projects and MVPs.
- harinijan 5y agoThanks, one of the creators of Rowy here. We hope that Rowy helps developers build their project functionality effortless on the serverless stack by building cloud functions, connecting to your fav third party apps and more. Give it a spin and we would love for your feedback. https://discord.com/invite/B8yAD5PDX4 https://discord.com/invite/B8yAD5PDX4
- marban 5y agoThe native GCP Firestore console makes my M1's non-existing fan blow up just by opening the site in Safari.
- notsidney 5y agoOh no! It looks like Firestore console uses Polymer components ( https://www.polymer-project.org https://www.polymer-project.org ) like YouTube, which was notorious for poor performance on anything that’s not Chrome. I thought M1 would fix that but I guess it’s such a big beast to tackle
- harinijan 5y agoHi, I am one of the creators of Rowy. With Rowy, we aim to bring to you an Airtable-like experience to manage your database with granular access controls at table and column levels to collaborate with your teammates, but that's just the start and it can do so much more than that. With Rowy you can build your MVP and continue to scale on the GCP/Firebase stack, write cloud functions effortlessly right in your browser. You can also connect to your favourite third party tools via our ready-made flexible extensions or build your own. Use any NPM packages or APIs. Love for your to give it a spin and share your feedback. LIVE demo: https://demo.rowy.io/ https://demo.rowy.io/ Join our community on Discord: https://discord.com/invite/B8yAD5PDX4 https://discord.com/invite/B8yAD5PDX4 Github: https://github.com/rowyio/rowy https://github.com/rowyio/rowy
- thecleaner 5y agoSome questions: - How many rows you can render in one session ? - Can too many writes lead to DB throttling ? - The frontend seems snappy. How will response time behave as more rows are added ? What will happen with 10 collaborators on a 1million x 20 table.
- mosdl 5y agoI assume the table only renders what is visible, doesn't render everything.
- harinijan 5y ago- We only fetch the rows of data as you keep scrolling and render only what you see on screen. - Since we are built on Firestore database, it is the same DB throttling as what Firestore provides which is 10MB IOPS - Since we only render what you see on the screen, the UI is very responsive and so can continue can scale.
- qwertyuiop_ 5y agoHi great work. The website is cool. Can you tell us which CMS / template did you use ?
- peterthehacker 5y agoAnother open source airtable alternative on the top of HN this year. NocoDB (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27303783 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27303783) BaseRow (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26448985 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26448985) Any idea why these projects are so popular in HN? What are the big pain points / problems these address? None have template libraries like Airtable or Smartsheet do, so it’s hard to get a sense of the use cases these tools specialize in.
- luckydata 5y agoeasy to use graphical database, they have better data integrity than excel and are essentially Microsoft Access on the web.
- peterthehacker 5y ago…
- luckydata 5y agoonly to people that never used Access. I used it to catalog user research, manage a roadmap, keep track of house maintenance... you're being pedantic for no reason, what's the use case for a database? Infinite. The problem with a DB is that you need to code to build a crud app, while a visual builder enables non technical people (or technical people in a hurry) to build a good-enough app to do just the job they need to do.
- peterthehacker 5y ago…
- harinijan 5y agoHi! I want to add that Rowy is an Airtable-like experience for your database. We built it because we like how easy and intuitive Airtable is to collaborate on the data but it has its limitation like any nocode platform does in terms of scalability, not synced to your production apps, limited storage, and inability to control access at a granular level. Rowy is built on top of Google Firestore, so you can build your MVP and continue to scale. Also, with Rowy you can build your product cloud functions and automations flexible ready-made third party apps, use any NPM package, API... so you can build you product backend without any limitations.
- evv 5y agoI hated Airtable because it was proprietary system that I could not modify or host myself. Rowy doesn't seem like an improvement because it only connects to Google Firestore, a proprietary and centralized service. Realistically I just want to use PostgreSQL and an open source UI on top, like NocoDB or Baserow. But hey, maybe Rowy will be a cold glass of water for those stuck in Firebase hell.
- karanbhangui 5y agoWonder if Rowy could be modified to use Hasura[0], a realtime grahql front-end to Postgres [0] https://hasura.io https://hasura.io
- harinijan 5y agoWe are starting with GCP/Firestore ecosystem first and solving for all the painpoints in it but are definitely looking at other DBs down he line.
- mritchie712 5y agoyou might like Supabase https://supabase.io/ https://supabase.io/
- kiwicopple 5y agosupabase cofounder here - thanks for the shoutout. GP: to save you a click, we're an "open source firebase alternative" but it might be simpler to think of us as an easy way to use Postgres. We give you a full PG database for every project and auto-generated APIs using PostgREST [0]. We configure everything in your project so that it's easy to use Postgres Row Level Security. We provide a few additional services that you typically need when building a product - connection pooling (pgbouncer), object storage, authentication + user management, dashboards, reports, etc. You don't need to use all of these - you can just use us as a "DBaaS" too. [0] https://postgrest.org/ https://postgrest.org/
- harinijan 5y agoI love the last sentence :) Indeed we are trying to solve for users on Firebase and solve their pain points first.
- omarhaneef 5y agoThe advantage of the firebase backend and open source is if you scale to something really big, you know what Google's infrastructure and pricing is so you are not relying on a startup to stick around or scale up or support your growth etc. That's great. What is the business model? Services?
- harinijan 5y agoThank you and yes we want to empower developers build fast on GCP from MVP to scale, with full flexibility. Your code and data stays on your own Firebase so don't have worry about locking in with us :) Currently, we are fully open-source and plan to introduce additional PRO features/parallel products sometime in the future.
- dudus 5y agoWorth mentioning that Google also has an AirTables clone. It's in Beta but pretty usable right now. And they say the Beta was succesfull and will stay available until a full launch is done in Google Cloud. https://tables.area120.google.com/about https://tables.area120.google.com/about
- abdusco 5y agoGiven that Google will cancel it in a couple of years[0], it's not worth investing time and effort to build on Google's products. [0]: https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/
- berkes 5y agoVisited that site expecting to see Google Reader, Talk and some more. Turns out its pages upon pages of services, most of which I never heard off. Is Google really just throwing stuff at the wall without even a thought about "what if it will stick"?
- rockostrich 5y agoThat's the sense that I get talking to anyone that works on new products at Google (GCP or otherwise). It seems like they just throw multiple teams at the same problem, see which one they like the most, and then sunset the others.
- techfoolery 5y agoOk, but is that true for GCP? The GCP portfolio seems to be intentionally run differently than products elsewhere within Google. Looking at that list, there's not much of a record for GCP products. I'm just skimming, maybe Chatbase but I believe the plan was always to integrate it into Dialogflow itself.
- flanbiscuit 5y agoMicrosoft also announced their own AirTable clone last year called "Lists" which should be available to all 365 users as of last summer. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/microsoft-lists https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/microsoft-list... https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-365-blog/announcing-microsoft-lists-your-smart-information-tracking-app/ba-p/1372233 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-365-blog/an... https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/19/microsoft-launches-lists-a-new-airtable-like-app-for-microsoft-365/ https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/19/microsoft-launches-lists-a...
- mhd 5y agoSo, how does it compare to DabbleDB?
- harinijan 5y agoWe haven't heard of this one, are they still active? Would like to hear your thoughts on how you use DabbleDB.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- nikolay 5y agoHmmm, it does not work for me as it redirects to /setup and then it goest to https://rowy.app/404 https://rowy.app/404 and that's it!
- notsidney 5y agoHi, I’m one of the engineers working on Rowy. We’ve noticed a recurring issue is Firestore isn’t enabled before deploying. Could you please check that you have enabled Firestore first?
- harinijan 5y agoIt should work if you use on a project that has Firebase enabled. Feel free to join our Discord and we can get your sorted in case of any other questions :) https://discord.com/invite/B8yAD5PDX4 https://discord.com/invite/B8yAD5PDX4
- nikolay 5y agoI did enable it after it failed the first time, but it still doesn't work.