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Another 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

Another 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 ago
easy to use graphical database, they have better data integrity than excel and are essentially Microsoft Access on the web.
- peterthehacker 5y ago
  …
  - luckydata 5y ago
    only 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 ago
Hi! 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.
exotree 5y ago
As a fairly technical person, relative to my peers in the industry, Airtable was the first time I really understand what a relational database from a tactical perspective is/could be!
nigggle 5y ago
Baserow does have template library here: https://baserow.io/templates/ https://baserow.io/templates/
- peterthehacker 5y ago
  Awesome! Thank you for sharing. This helps.
bram2w 5y ago
Disclaimer, I’m the founder of Baserow. Airtable is a fantastic product, but it’s also limited in the amount of records that you can store. Their enterprise plan supports a maximum of 100k records in your entire database. Another problem is that you don’t own your data because it’s a SaaS product and if you want to create an integration, you can only do so via their API which limits you in the amount of requests you can make per second. We wanted to solve these problems by building a turn-key open source no-code database tool that you can self host with a comparable user experience to Airtable. We have a different technical approach that allows you to store a lot of data while staying performant. Another nice advantage is that our code architecture is modular, that means you can create real custom plugins. You can create custom field types of visualize data in a different way by creating custom view types. Everything can be extended.
- louisvgchi 5y ago
  How do you plan to make money? Consulting?
- jinto36 5y ago
  The row limits in Airtable seem absurd, and to me make it seem like a great tool to use for prototyping but not for long-term production. The biology lab I'm in has a bunch of Filemaker databases I've been thinking of migrating to an Airtable-like system (because I can't be the only person who knows how to use it or maintain it) but we'd already be at 50k rows! And there's no way a small academic bio lab is going to pay "enterprise" plan money. TL;DR I've been looking at Baserow as a possible solution, so thanks!
mguerville 5y ago
I went the baserow route because I feel that Airtable throttles features aggressively to push for paid accounts and my use cases don't warrant spending on a recurring subscription. It's more limited features-wise (no formulas for instance) and the UI is more gloomy than Airtable but for simple needs that you want to protect against a future revenue maximization strategy (I wouldn't be surprised if Airtable kept dialing back what a free account provides) I can recommend it (and it supports .csv export in case you need to migrate)
- bram2w 5y ago
  Baserow founder here. Excited to inform you that we released version 1.6 of Baserow today and that includes the formula field.
  - hunterb123 5y ago
    Might seem a bit pedantic, but is there a dark mode? I cannot stare at a white spreadsheet all day unfortunately.
    - harinijan 5y ago
      If it helps, Rowy has dark mode :)
zem 5y ago
my hoped-for use case was to be able to use one of these as a shared data grid in a webapp - that is, have a google sheets like collaborative spreadsheet backed by a db table, and use that as a component in my app. I checked a few out a while ago and sadly none of them really looked suitable for that - they were all pushing hard on the no code angle and seemed pretty hard to strip down to just a table component.
- koziserek 5y ago
  Did you try directus.io ?
  - zem 5y ago
    no, i missed that one when i was searching, but from the homepage and a quick glance through the docs it doesn't seem like it does what i need. what i want is something like react-data-grid [https://github.com/adazzle/react-data-grid https://github.com/adazzle/react-data-grid] but with a backend component that handles collaborative updates. essentially a stripped down and actively maintained alternative to ethercalc [https://ethercalc.net/ https://ethercalc.net/] baserow had a lot of what i wanted, but the top-level feature set seemed very oriented towards a db admin tool rather than a programmatically managed user interface to single tables or views.

luckydata 5y ago

easy to use graphical database, they have better data integrity than excel and are essentially Microsoft Access on the web.

peterthehacker 5y ago
…
- luckydata 5y ago
  only 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 ago

Hi! 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.

exotree 5y ago

As a fairly technical person, relative to my peers in the industry, Airtable was the first time I really understand what a relational database from a tactical perspective is/could be!

nigggle 5y ago

Baserow does have template library here: https://baserow.io/templates/ https://baserow.io/templates/

peterthehacker 5y ago
Awesome! Thank you for sharing. This helps.

bram2w 5y ago

Disclaimer, I’m the founder of Baserow. Airtable is a fantastic product, but it’s also limited in the amount of records that you can store. Their enterprise plan supports a maximum of 100k records in your entire database. Another problem is that you don’t own your data because it’s a SaaS product and if you want to create an integration, you can only do so via their API which limits you in the amount of requests you can make per second. We wanted to solve these problems by building a turn-key open source no-code database tool that you can self host with a comparable user experience to Airtable. We have a different technical approach that allows you to store a lot of data while staying performant. Another nice advantage is that our code architecture is modular, that means you can create real custom plugins. You can create custom field types of visualize data in a different way by creating custom view types. Everything can be extended.

louisvgchi 5y ago
How do you plan to make money? Consulting?
jinto36 5y ago
The row limits in Airtable seem absurd, and to me make it seem like a great tool to use for prototyping but not for long-term production. The biology lab I'm in has a bunch of Filemaker databases I've been thinking of migrating to an Airtable-like system (because I can't be the only person who knows how to use it or maintain it) but we'd already be at 50k rows! And there's no way a small academic bio lab is going to pay "enterprise" plan money. TL;DR I've been looking at Baserow as a possible solution, so thanks!

mguerville 5y ago

I went the baserow route because I feel that Airtable throttles features aggressively to push for paid accounts and my use cases don't warrant spending on a recurring subscription. It's more limited features-wise (no formulas for instance) and the UI is more gloomy than Airtable but for simple needs that you want to protect against a future revenue maximization strategy (I wouldn't be surprised if Airtable kept dialing back what a free account provides) I can recommend it (and it supports .csv export in case you need to migrate)

bram2w 5y ago
Baserow founder here. Excited to inform you that we released version 1.6 of Baserow today and that includes the formula field.
- hunterb123 5y ago
  Might seem a bit pedantic, but is there a dark mode? I cannot stare at a white spreadsheet all day unfortunately.
  - harinijan 5y ago
    If it helps, Rowy has dark mode :)

zem 5y ago

my hoped-for use case was to be able to use one of these as a shared data grid in a webapp - that is, have a google sheets like collaborative spreadsheet backed by a db table, and use that as a component in my app. I checked a few out a while ago and sadly none of them really looked suitable for that - they were all pushing hard on the no code angle and seemed pretty hard to strip down to just a table component.

koziserek 5y ago
Did you try directus.io ?
- zem 5y ago
  no, i missed that one when i was searching, but from the homepage and a quick glance through the docs it doesn't seem like it does what i need. what i want is something like react-data-grid [https://github.com/adazzle/react-data-grid https://github.com/adazzle/react-data-grid] but with a backend component that handles collaborative updates. essentially a stripped down and actively maintained alternative to ethercalc [https://ethercalc.net/ https://ethercalc.net/] baserow had a lot of what i wanted, but the top-level feature set seemed very oriented towards a db admin tool rather than a programmatically managed user interface to single tables or views.