[HN Gopher] Rowy: Open-source Airtable alternative on Google Cloud
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Rowy: Open-source Airtable alternative on Google Cloud
Author : karanbhangui
Score : 220 points
Date : 2021-10-05 12:44 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.rowy.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.rowy.io)
| mhd wrote:
| So, how does it compare to DabbleDB?
| yingw787 wrote:
| This 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 wrote:
| Thanks, 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
| peterthehacker wrote:
| Another open source airtable alternative on the top of HN this
| year.
|
| NocoDB (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27303783)
|
| BaseRow (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.
| exotree wrote:
| 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!
| bram2w wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| How do you plan to make money? Consulting?
| nigggle wrote:
| Baserow does have template library here:
| https://baserow.io/templates/
| peterthehacker wrote:
| Awesome! Thank you for sharing. This helps.
| zem wrote:
| 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.
| harinijan wrote:
| 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.
| luckydata wrote:
| easy to use graphical database, they have better data integrity
| than excel and are essentially Microsoft Access on the web.
| peterthehacker wrote:
| ...
| luckydata wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| ...
| mguerville wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Baserow founder here. Excited to inform you that we released
| version 1.6 of Baserow today and that includes the formula
| field.
| hunterb123 wrote:
| Might seem a bit pedantic, but is there a dark mode?
|
| I cannot stare at a white spreadsheet all day
| unfortunately.
| harinijan wrote:
| 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'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/
|
| Join our community on Discord:
| https://discord.com/invite/B8yAD5PDX4
|
| Github: https://github.com/rowyio/rowy
| qwertyuiop_ wrote:
| Hi great work. The website is cool. Can you tell us which CMS /
| template did you use ?
| bdcravens wrote:
| According to Wappalyzer it's built using Webflow.
| bram2w wrote:
| Hi, Rowy seems like an interesting product! I'll definitely try
| it out. Is it related to firetable (https://firetable.io/) by
| any chance? I see similarities in the interface and both can
| connect to firestore.
| oracardo wrote:
| Apparently they rebranded Firetable to Rowy:
| https://twitter.com/RowyIO/status/1445296608174690306
| [deleted]
| thecleaner wrote:
| Some 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 wrote:
| I assume the table only renders what is visible, doesn't
| render everything.
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| hi. i didn't check the documents that deeply but can you just
| quickly tell me if its possible to install on your own vps as
| opposed to what is being advertised, "GCP" isnt for everyone,
| maybe on a vm hosted locally or something else.
| js4ever wrote:
| Any plans to have a fully self hosted version based on Mongodb
| / Postgres / Whatever? :)
|
| What you made looks super cool, but I don't want to host
| anything on GCP / Firebase
| mritchie712 wrote:
| What's the business model? I'm confused by the random "alerts"
| project that's grouped into the same company.
| pantulis wrote:
| 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!
| FirstLvR wrote:
| a web frontend for Firebase? sounds too good
| harinijan wrote:
| Indeed it is :)
| harinijan wrote:
| Hi! 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.
| dudus wrote:
| Worth 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
| flanbiscuit wrote:
| Microsoft 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-list...
|
| https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-365-blog/an...
|
| https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/19/microsoft-launches-lists-a...
| abdusco wrote:
| Given 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/
| techfoolery wrote:
| Ok, 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.
| berkes wrote:
| Visited 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 wrote:
| That'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.
| ithkuil wrote:
| > The Tables beta is currently available in the U.S.
|
| Why, oh why?
| marban wrote:
| The native GCP Firestore console makes my M1's non-existing fan
| blow up just by opening the site in Safari.
| evv wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Wonder if Rowy could be modified to use Hasura[0], a realtime
| grahql front-end to Postgres
|
| [0] https://hasura.io
| harinijan wrote:
| We 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 wrote:
| you might like Supabase
|
| https://supabase.io/
| kiwicopple wrote:
| supabase 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/
| omarhaneef wrote:
| The 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?
| [deleted]
| artemonster wrote:
| I wonder how big is the market for such ,,airtable clones"?
| ramraj07 wrote:
| Slightly different model would be very valuable. Airtables 50k
| row limit is very annoying and blocks us from even trying.
| harinijan wrote:
| Hi Ramraj, we literally had this painpoint ourselves and
| thats why we built it. Rowy is airtable-like experience but
| on your Google Firestore stack. That means its highly
| scalable without any limits. Give it a try.
| artemonster wrote:
| What 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...
| runawaybottle wrote:
| To be honest, in certain enterprises (probably many startups as
| well) there's just no need for UI other than tables. We get an
| api, mangle the result into some grouping, and then dump it
| into a table, over and over again.
|
| Sometimes we let the user click a row, and do something about
| it, hah.
| topicseed wrote:
| Big enough for Google to release their own product soon --
| https://tables.area120.google.com/about
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| I 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.
| the-dude wrote:
| Have you ever tried to convince an Excel user to try
| something else? How did it go?
| artemonster wrote:
| Selling ,,broad" swissknife-like tools is harder than niche
| ones, so I am unsure here
| harinijan wrote:
| Hi, rather than saying Airtable clone, we would like to say
| that we bring to you an Airtable-like experience but for your
| actual production database. So that non-technical users can
| access the data in a granular permission controlled interface
| while your developers can continue to build product
| functionality and scale and not have to do data BAU tasks.
| merlinscholz wrote:
| There's also https://baserow.io/
| mijailt wrote:
| And https://www.nocodb.com/
| rnavi wrote:
| Thanks for the shoutout (NocoDB founder here). Rowy demo
| looks good. Would love to try it.
|
| NocoDB works differently than rowy, we transform ANY existing
| MySQL/Postgres/SQLite into Airtable like spreadsheet.
|
| Github : https://github.com/nocodb/nocodb
|
| Docker : docker run -d -p 8080:8080 nocodb/nocodb
| mst wrote:
| The screenshots look to me like half smart spreadsheet,
| half automagic admin ui on steroids. And I mean this
| positively, that's really rather impressive looking.
| rilut wrote:
| Thank you NocoDB for supporting mysql, so I don't have to
| maintain another type of database and mysql is easy to sync
| to our analytics
| rnavi wrote:
| Thank you, what analytics are you using with mysql ?
| harinijan wrote:
| Nocodb is great, however I think it doesn't support
| Firestore. We are build on the GCP/Firebase stack and deeply
| aim to solve for all the pain points of Google Cloud
| ecosystem.
| desireco42 wrote:
| BaseRow looks way cooler to me and immediately obvious ie. I
| know how I would use it.
|
| Thanks for posting.
| harinijan wrote:
| BaseRow 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.
| desireco42 wrote:
| Hey, thanks for clarifying but what is appealing there is
| that you can use Postgres for backend and it would work
| with that. You have very focused solution on Google
| environment.
| peterthehacker wrote:
| What 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
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