"Open core", seems to mean the low level libs (useful for sure) are FOSS while the full featured apps are proprietary. This is kind of unpleasant since it creates a tension between a natural desire to build featureful apps with the low level stuff, and not wanting to "bite the hand" that supplied grist-core. Similar things happen with other partly-proprietary programs like ansible.<p>Aren't there already some FOSS alternatives to google sheets? No idea about airtable, don't even know what it is.<p>As for simple ways to write a form app, ActiveAdmin is one of the few things I like about Rails.
Some other interesting complementary projects found from that reddit thread:<p>Budibase: <a href="https://budibase.com/" rel="nofollow">https://budibase.com/</a><p>NocoDB: <a href="https://nocodb.com/" rel="nofollow">https://nocodb.com/</a>
This distinctly reminds me of MS Access. Was a teen at the time, but saw (through my father) a whole bunch of small businesses that basically ran off of an Access database with a bunch of forms for invoicing and such.
No no, it's not an alternative to Airtable and Google Sheets, it's much more than that! Seeing the demo, coupled with the Python support, I felt like anyone could built a complex SAAS like Salesforce on it.
As a developer who has been in React/Angular/Vue era, why didn't this project leverage these modern technologies for UI and instead went with Backbone and Knockout?<p>I am just trying think outside of the modern widely used frameworks and see how they solve some unique problems?<p>Please anybody can tell me why still anybody use good old technologies for frontend in their products?
I wish more code was written like this: <a href="https://github.com/gristlabs/grist-core/blob/main/app/server/lib/Sessions.ts" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/gristlabs/grist-core/blob/main/app/server...</a>
This looks like just what I needed when I built my "admin ui" last year.<p>Instead of building an admin ui with Django or similar, I encourage you to just stick with a web-based spreadsheet for your internal users (if you have a small team, technical teammates, startup, etc).
For anyone wondering what Open Core means, Grist explains their approach:
`Grist Labs is an open-core company. We offer Grist hosting as a service, with free and paid plans. We intend to also develop and sell features related to Grist using a proprietary license, targeted at the needs of enterprises with large self-managed installations. `
Here's a better link directly to the project on GitHub: <a href="https://github.com/gristlabs/grist-core#readme" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/gristlabs/grist-core#readme</a>
That is amazing. I've complained about the lack of "spreadsheet but more structured" ms-access-like solutions here a few times. I've been a happy airtable user for a while. But this is really the next step. I love it and can't wait to give it a go (self hosted)
Airtable makes most money from pro/business use cases and that's what alternatives mentioned here compete for.<p>But consider personal/family use: Recipe collections, inventories, todo, personal project planning and tracking, ... There competitors won't need more powerful scripting/customizability, just basic feature parity plus cutting the dismal ~6 seconds startup time of Airtable's Android and Windows apps. "Same but faster" wins me over.
Great idea! I wonder if there's anything similar to this in other programming languages?<p>Would love to see something like this in Ruby or Elixir.
I tried to load the CSV that I most recently imported into Google Sheets into this hosted Grist and it choked. The behavior of the progress bar implies some kind of super-linear algorithm.<p>The most important component of "alternative to Google Sheets" is function. "Open core" is an aesthetic matter of little interest to most users.
I've been looking for something like this for ages! Self-hosting is so important for databases; I plan on piping way too much data for me not to own the stack.<p>Baserow seemed to be my best bet initially, but it seems like the Grist feature set is way more what I'm looking for.
I tried it for 5 minutes on docs.getgrist.com.<p>Maybe it's similar to Airtable (never used it), because it has nothing similar to GSheets/Excel other than it's a table.<p>Like, I don't even know how to do "=A1+A2".
I was tempted to try this but I'm fed up with getting spam from US-based companies so I'll only jump on board if they either comply with GDPR or otherwise tell a really good privacy story. Sadly that doesn't seem to be the case here, with a paltry privacy policy hidden even further out of sight than usual and no promises about handling data at the point of capture.<p>Sure, I could sign up with a temporary email address to try it out, but why invest that effort if I know that I'm not going to trust them if I become a regular user?
This looks good but you need to import the data into it. It would be great if it can be connected to an existing DB.
From the discussion, came across <a href="https://nocodb.com/" rel="nofollow">https://nocodb.com/</a> but the authorization levels doesn't seem fine grained enough. For ex. limiting access for group of users to a particular schema in postgresql
Neat. Reminds me of FileMaker from back in the day, which I believe still exists.<p><hot-take> More programmer-focused, less UI/normal-folk focused. </hot-take>