Rowy: Open-source Airtable alternative on Google Cloud

Hi, 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&#x27;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&#x2F;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.<p>Love for your to give it a spin and share your feedback.<p>LIVE demo: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;demo.rowy.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;demo.rowy.io&#x2F;</a><p>Join our community on Discord: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;discord.com&#x2F;invite&#x2F;B8yAD5PDX4" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;discord.com&#x2F;invite&#x2F;B8yAD5PDX4</a><p>Github: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;rowyio&#x2F;rowy" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;rowyio&#x2F;rowy</a>

Another open source airtable alternative on the top of HN this year.<p>NocoDB (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=27303783" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=27303783</a>)<p>BaseRow (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=26448985" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=26448985</a>)<p>Any idea why these projects are so popular in HN? What are the big pain points &#x2F; problems these address?<p>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.

Worth mentioning that Google also has an AirTables clone. It&#x27;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.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tables.area120.google.com&#x2F;about" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tables.area120.google.com&#x2F;about</a>

There’s also <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;baserow.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;baserow.io&#x2F;</a>

This looks awesome, thanks for building this! I really like how it&#x27;s hosted on serverless stuff and therefore we can use it for long-running personal projects and MVPs.

Is 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!

I hated Airtable because it was proprietary system that I could not modify or host myself. Rowy doesn&#x27;t seem like an improvement because it only connects to Google Firestore, a proprietary and centralized service.<p>Realistically I just want to use PostgreSQL and an open source UI on top, like NocoDB or Baserow.<p>But hey, maybe Rowy will be a cold glass of water for those stuck in Firebase hell.

I wonder how big is the market for such „airtable clones“?

Others have already mentioned BaseRow and NocoDB but there’s another entrant in this space:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;firetable.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;firetable.io&#x2F;</a><p>[EDIT] just noticed, Firetable seems to have been productized into Rowy! Site is still up but github project redirects to rowyio&#x2F;rowy<p>Can someone from AntlerVC talk about the move&#x2F;reposition? Is someone from the team running with the idea?

The advantage of the firebase backend and open source is if you scale to something really big, you know what Google&#x27;s infrastructure and pricing is so you are not relying on a startup to stick around or scale up or support your growth etc.<p>That&#x27;s great.<p>What is the business model? Services?

Hmmm, it does not work for me as it redirects to &#x2F;setup and then it goest to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rowy.app&#x2F;404" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rowy.app&#x2F;404</a> and that&#x27;s it!

The native GCP Firestore console makes my M1&#x27;s non-existing fan blow up just by opening the site in Safari.

So, how does it compare to DabbleDB?