TablePlus – Modern, Native Tool for Database Management
tableplus.com
tableplus.com
It offers so many features that seem so natural. Quick editability which in some cases saves a ton of time. Tabs for different tables, plain text editing for queries with highlighting for ease of reading. There are other database interactors, that do the same thing, but really for me, I've found the UI/UX looks and feels so much better than others, and as a user, that really is a huge part of it.
As for the licensing price, I started by trying it out in the free, two tab version. I then stepped back and thought about how for me, the benefit it gave me was well worth $60.
Again, I have nothing to do with them, but for how nice it's been for me, I feel it deserves a shoutout.
It is awesome to have one very powerful and well-maintained program for all my database needs. I can get proficient at one tool and use it for everything. In addition, I can pay 1 licensing fee and get access to a powerful tool for working with all of these databases, instead of needing a separate tool for each one (which was the case in the past).
The pricing model is EXTREMELY FAIR in my opinion. First of all, it is free to use in its entirety forever, with only a small handful of limitations. New devs will easily be satisfied with the free version. You can upgrade to support them and to remove the few limitations in the free version for just $60. This is well worth any developer's time as it accounts for only an hour or two of their wages most likely. I also like that it is a perpetual license, so you don't need to "subscribe" if you don't want to. You do need to renew if you want newer versions, as the $60 license only covers 1 year of updates. But i think that this is a great balance between being fair (it is perpetual at the version + 12mos that you bought it at), while also incentivizing and allowing to support further development. Finally offering a generous free version supports newbies and the dev community.
Lastly I need to point out an often-overlooked reason to consider TablePlus. They offer tools on every platform (Mac, Windows, Linux). And MOST IMPORTANTLY, this isn't an electron application. Each version is maintained by a seperate team (from my understanding) within their business and it is built on the native language and frameworks for that platform.
About 1.5-2 years ago I started a discussion on their forum about bringing a version to Linux (at the time it was only Windows and Mac). The forum post quickly started gaining momentum from other Linux users who discussed how there is quite literally NO good DB GUI on Linux (other than the CLI). Let alone something as easy to use and powerful as TablePlus. The team eventually committed to a Linux version, and after a year of development updates I was invited to the beta and had been using it ever since.
This team really is great and I highly recommend trying their tool for free and upgrading to the paid version if you find it useful, which I think any developer will.
The new Linux client might be a good example of where the Windows client was a year/ year and a half ago. It works, but lacking a lot still. I’m confident they will continue to iterate and get it up to speed soon.
Big fan of Table Plus here. I like the ease of use and the clean UI. It’s everything you need, and nothing you don’t. Very smooth workflow.
I am glad it's not Elektron. I am also using TablePlus and enjoying it a lot!
There are some UI glitches, but it is alpha software. I do like the simple UI; DBeaver does feel very busy in comparison. I'll keep updating as it progresses through alpha and see how it improves.
1. https://tableplus.com/blog/2019/10/tableplus-linux-installat...
The thing I think it gives you is a smooth, frictionless workflow. The UI is simple & uncluttered. Everything you need for the most common tasks is easy to find.
I bet the Linux TablePlus will be up to speed in features by the end of the year.
You never heard of DataGrip then?
1. Importing large SQL files into DB is slow, SequelPro seems to be much faster;
2. No option to add/delete connection when you choose "Show connections";
3. Maybe it is a free limitation but almost every time i want to open a table it wants to create a new tab;
4. It doesn't want to reconnect to the server (even when cmd +r) if it lost connection - must close and open server again;
5. I have noticed that 2 different databases which are exact copies (structurally) have different column order so doing simple cmd + c in one DB and then cmd + v will mess up the data as the column order is different.
In case they're not watching this thread, I think they would appreciate your feedback.
as a feature limited to the enterprise version sounds kind of scary.
DBeaver internal formatter is decent and if I want more I can use an external tool.
For example, if you have a table called "catalog_product_flat", would the autocomplete suggest that table when you typed "catprfl"?
Whatever both buyer and seller agree on. I think in general buyers can agree that, by the nature of software and the existence of the internet, if people share their bought software like they would any other object, then the seller risks not being able to make any profit at all. Since sharing software is copying software, there's no equivalent of "returning" what was borrowed. It's a compromise most buyers can understand.
However, charging per machine of the same user seems to cross the line, no? Sellers are pushing, and I think it's valid here for buyers to push back.
EDIT: Could we have the courtesy of including explanatory replies with downvotes? Simply downvoting seems like the equivalent of replying, "No. Shut up."
I'll be a paying customer but I need a little flexibility. I use more than one computer and some other devices - I don't need an SQL tool on all of them but definitely on more than one.
Having used TablePlus for a couple months with both Postgres and SQLite, I only have positive things to say.
I probably feel too strongly about this. Last week I setup a nytimes cooking subscription and then immediately canceled it when I realize I had to leave it on auto pay or else it wouldn’t work.
No other paid software I use does that. Sketchup, Sublime, Jetbrains, and Office for instance.
Believing that most engineers only have one computer IMO seems out of touch with reality.
And also includes their database tool, DataGrip.
Which is awesome by itself. I use it regularly and only have minor issues with some of it's behavior, but the experience is worlds-ahead than what I've encountered previously at that price point.
I really have no clue how anyone thought that was an unnecessary feature.
Right now I cannot modify that in Datagrip, but worse, I cannot even see it without a raw query.
Also, TablePlus seems to be selling well (at least from what I see around me), so I am not personally of the opinion that they should change their model!
Also to note that their free version is still _very_ usable, I survived on that itself for many months spending hours in the tool.
No thanks. I don't rent software.
I have been using it daily for pg, mysql, occasionally for redis and sqllite, it works great and gets continuous improvements. I wish this company all the best, great product, great support.
If I happen to need TP next time I'm using that machine, the cost of adding another seat to the license is offset by some fraction of an hours billable work, and lasts for a year.
What's always missing from these type of discussions is the consideration that just maybe, offering it as per-seat rather than per-person is why the price is what it is.
Would you prefer it it was per-person but cost $99 for a licence, with a year of updates?
Sure, that gives you the warm fuzzy feeling, and benefits anyone with > 2 machines, but it doubles the price for those who only need one seat under the current scheme.
I'm lucky enough to be paid pretty well for my skills and experience, and I (or technically my company) can maintain some software and release it as open source. But I'm also very aware that high quality fully native developer tools are quite few and far between, and the number that are also cross platform is miniscule. There is significant competition from things built using "cross platform runtimes" (Electron, Java). So when one comes along that is as good as this, they could charge twice what they do and I'd pay happily - but not everyone can justify/afford that much on developer tools.
Setapp lets you use apps on as many devices as you want. But like streaming services these days, you can only have apps through Setapp actively running based on the seats you have. Though if you have say 2-3 seats for Setapp. And launch Setapp and some apps on a 4th comp. whichever comp has to get off Setapp to give space, you can usually keep apps open. Just can’t re-open them until a seat space is available again. M
The community edition is updated more often than i would like and sometimes features break but bugs get fixed quickly and they add usefull stuff all the time.
Dont know what i would do if i was stuck with pgAdmin...
pgAdmin is not good.
I still miss SequelPro, as its search and export features where way better then TablePlus’ way.
You have to invalidate / refresh the DB connection so often and this is really an issue when you use Docker in development.
If you do a docker-compose stop and then docker-compose up, your PostgreSQL connection will drop which means you need to reset it in DBeaver manually.
Also 2019: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19160808
And another 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18004727
I used DataGrip after SequelPro stopped updating to support MySQL 8 and apparently it's feature rich but got annoyed how it's bloated and takes half a minute to launch.
I still prefer SequelPro for it's layout and UI but finally dropped it in favor of TablePlus as now it seems close enough to that usability.
Also of note is that the author is really responsive and friendly on GitHub who corrected some minor UI issues pretty quickly when I reported.
SQL Server's free native tool is SSMS (SQL Server Management Studio), which is one of the most powerful SQL clients I've ever used. (despite my carryover reservations with MS products from the 1980s-90s, SQL Server is indisputably an innovative and solid piece of technology -- MS did something right with their database group). One can interact syntactically with the database via pure SQL, but SSMS lets you access the deep corners of the database quickly via a GUI (SQL is a great query language, but many admin/ops tasks are much more easily done via a GUI -- writing SQL every time you want make a simple change is tedious plus nobody remembers the syntax for infrequently used features). Some of the features I use regularly: row/column/covering index creation, linked servers, user management, live query plans, create/alter script generation from existing objects (stored proc, view, index, table, etc.). I've never seen these features exposed in any third party SQL GUI client.
Postgres has a bunch of very powerful features too, and I've never seen these exposed in GUI tools.
Jetbrains' DataGrip comes the closest, but because it needs to support lowest common denominator features across databases, it doesn't expose deep features either.
I wonder if folks are giving up deep feature discovery by using an generic GUI SQL client.
Exception: Oracle SQL Developer. It's native to Oracle but is quite unpleasant to use.
> wonder if one is giving up a lot of power.
That’s an irrational concern. GUI tools also come with SQL consoles where you can do anything that’s possible in the CLI. With the added benefit of results being presented in a nicer way.
Is it though?
So for SQL Server, you can't really see the live query plan (real-time plan + statistics while the query is running) without the GUI. You cannot see the Activity Monitor without the GUI. There are elements that cannot be accessed via pure SQL. 3rd party GUIs generally don't support these features.
Sure, assuming that MSSQL is a foot.
The speed of searching for anything in DataGrip is just so beautiful and amazing for productivity. A big downside is we have run into situations where a SP is cached and is an old version and DataGrip doesn’t notify me that’s the case.
That is a weakness of SSMS, and I've no good answers.
For stuff like SQL formatting though, the free ApexSQL Refactor [1] has been a godsend for me. I write a lot of complex analytic queries and having the ability to tidy up statements as I'm writing the query is amazing.
It is clumsy and painful, and I will most often just query the sys schema to search for objects, but GUI search is there.
SSMS, unfortunately, is missing a ton of features that 3rd-party clients have mastered -- instant search/filter through query results, quick aggregating of numeric results (min max, sum, avg, sd, etc), sorting on any column, exporting to multiple formats, filtering of schema objects, charts from query results -- just off the top of my head. They also enable many tasks via GUI like creating/editing table schemas, importing bulk data, pre-query variable substitution, etc.
SSMS is free, and should be installed whenever one needs to interface with SQL Server, but good 3rd party clients are generally better at 90+% of common tasks, while SSMS only needs to be used for a handful of specific features that it does very well.
> SSMS, unfortunately, is missing a ton of features that 3rd-party clients have mastered -- instant search/filter through query results, quick aggregating of numeric results (min max, sum, avg, sd, etc), sorting on any column, exporting to multiple formats, filtering of schema objects, charts from query results -- just off the top of my head. They also enable many tasks via GUI like creating/editing table schemas, importing bulk data, pre-query variable substitution, etc.
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True, those are fair points. It does depend on one's use case. Instant search/filter/sort through query results is a useful one that seems to be an omission on SSMS's part.
Quick aggregation and charting are nice to haves, but I would typically do these in Jupyter or Tableau (or Excel if it's a small dataset). These are not features most people would miss if they weren't in their SQL client. Pre-query variable substitution is a great idea, though in SSMS one can use DECLARE @var in many instances (not all) -- it's also not widely supported in 3rd party clients except for more advanced ones like DataGrip.
SSMS does have a pretty comprehensive GUI for creates/edits of schemas. Bulk data ingest can be done in multiple ways (CSV import GUI, bacpacs/dacpacs, backup/restores or using the bcp CLI that comes with SSMS) -- also bulk ingest is not a common feature in 3rd party GUIs.
Side note: for really large data ingests from Parquet etc. I write my own ETL in C# which uses the SqlBulkCopy class (or "turbodbc" in Python) for fast ETL. No GUI client I know can do this.
Your response lists what other clients do better than SSMS, which to me is a different question, so my reply was more in response to this question. I agree that those clients have features that SSMS does not or is weak at. I also think a handful of those features are nice to have but not really something I would expect from a SQL client so I'm neutral about them. That's all.
I believe the two questions lead to separate discussions (both of which I'm happy to engage in), and are non mutually exclusive. Other clients can have all these other nice features which SSMS doesn't, but that does not imply that that there's not still a tradeoff when it comes to their lack of native support for a database's deep features.
I think the pricing is low enough to overcome these annoyances but I’d rather pay double and not have to be concerned with buying another license when I dual boot another OS.
I develop on Mac 95% of the time, so I own a license on Mac, but on Windows I just use the free version because I don't use it on Windows enough to justify paying for it on that device, despite the fact I am a paying customer. This is an annoyance for me. However, I rarely run into any of the free-version limitations on Windows since I am usually just logging in quickly to check on something on Windows and not doing anything major. If I need to do some hardcore work I pull it up on my mac, which has a better dev environment. But it is extremely annoying the few times when I do go to open several tabs on WIndows and remember that despite being a paying customer, I can not use these paid features because I am using it on the wrong platform.
I don't have a problem with the perpetual license that doesn't include perpetual updates. To me, if you are using the tool that often, you can support the team that builds something that you most likely make money off using. One year of updates for TablePlus is nearly equivalent to a month of updates from Adobe. At $60 a year we are talking about $5 a month. Which is very little to most developers, who purchase $6 coffees and $15 salads without batting an eye.
But I would like to see a per-seat option. Especially because I most likely wouldn't/couldn't use two different computers at the same time, it seems fair to let me install it on a few OS's if I desire.
These products should have a mandatory feature comparison chart to their competition - it'd speed up the inevitable decline of mediocre competition that relies on gaming google search results for its survival. I back in the day had to download and suffer through half a dozen DB clients that do the same thing slightly differently.
Also comes as part of the deal if you have a Setapp subscription (https://setapp.com/ )
(And just to be clear, I’m not affilated with either company.)
In product hunt I see same products arriving again with version #2 e.t.c
I know VSCode and Typescript announce their new versions here too.
May be the official policy is "it doesn't matter, unless too spammy?"
Includes MongoDB in the list.
This sort of put me off. Personally I am fine with a single user perpetual license for my use case. But as they are claiming it being a young project and likely to have more bugs than your average mature product. Why do you expect me to renew my license to get your updates ? doesn't seem fair.
> TablePlus is a young project, we fix bugs and add new features every day, then put them together in a new update released at the end of week/month.
That week/month could fall a year after the date of my initial purchase :(
SetApp subscription for 2 Macs (includes TablePlus): $108/year
I wonder how they manage around DRM rights with the individual app publisher?
I actually discovered TablesPlus thorough SetApp and liked it enough to buy the Windows version for the times I use Windows.
There are a number of apps in SetApp I’ve already paid for, but talking to a friend who is a SetApp author, if I install the SetApp version, that actually helps him get paid more so when I do have overlap, I install the SetApp version.
(My friend makes decent money off of SetApp which made me feel a lot better about the whole thing and feel comfortable it wasn’t predatory towards indie app makers).
I am trying it now and the trial version doesn't show me ads, at least not yet ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Otherwise Setapp is Netflix for Mac apps. A pretty limited amount. But no ads and the selection is pretty good.
You might want to report it on GitHub as they seemed quite responsive the last time I reported an issue.
For example, if you have a table called "catalog_product_flat", would this program's autocomplete suggest that table when you typed "catprfl"?
That's one feature I find is missing from every single DBA program out there except for DataGrip, which I don't like because it's overkill.
Many DB connection UI's (except MySQL Workbench and Sequel Pro I think) requires some kind of purchase. Besides My company uses Sequel Pro it always had either crashed or having slow import/export speeds etc.
Even TablePlus can import/export between engines using CSV files, which is IMHO awesome option to have.
Remind me again what the EOL for Windows 95 was.
"Even today, millions of PCs are still running Windows 7, and the operating system still runs on a massive 26 percent of all PCs according to data from Netmarketshare."
https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/14/21065122/microsoft-window...
And by the way they actually explicit mention it on the homepage - it says .NET 4.8 right under the download button.
True, that. Except who keeps track of which version of .NET works with what? I for one don't.
Years ago, I used to use TablePlus on my Win 7 box but eventually canned it for better (IMO) alternatives. So when TablePlus recently reappeared on HN, I decided to give it another tryout.
Not one to keep track of .NET compatibility, I simply clicked their "Download for Windows" button, and ran their setup program, which eventually prompted for me to download/install .NET 4.8, as if everything was okay so far...
All this extraneous effort could easily have been avoided simply by:
a) s/Download for Windows/Download for Windows 10/
b) Browser OS sniffing-->Sorry, you're using an unsupported OS
c) Their install program could have announced straight away-->Sorry, you're using an unsupported OS
As another comment mentions, support for Linux is a big plus - we need better GUIs in there.
However, SQLPal only supports Oracle.
It has a couple of annoying bugs but it's feature set develops in general much more along my actual needs.
The Redis implementation of TablePlus is rather worthless to me compared to what Redis Desktop Manager does as it doesn't sensibly group keys, it doesn't give me much information about the relevant redis metrics (memory usage especially).
Over in the MySQL side of things of TablePlus I like the way it structures its filters and the way I can actually copy a column of values in sensible formats, but besides these two features i'm much happier with HeidiSQL, so that's where I put my money.
It's so bad that it makes me wonder if I just have something misconfigured instead of it being an application bug.
datagrip paginates results in batches of 500 by default, which helps with not accidentally making the interface implode on itself
(At least if you only need to work with MySQL, obviously?)
DynamoDB is great at its one killer feature of supporting arbitrarily huge tables without you having to worry about any details. For everything else, it's just kind of adequate, considering the constraint of needing to support multi-Terabyte tables. It lacks a huge number of features that all RDBMSes have that would admittedly be impossible or not make sense on huge tables. Thus, it doesn't make much sense to try to access it from a RDBMS GUI.
The AWS Console provides all of the GUI that really makes sense for it, plus the CLI tools and API.
> TablePlus is a native application. We are using Swift, Objective-C, C/C++, Perl for OSX, C# for Windows.
- Sequel Pro's UI is much simpler
- it's been around for over a decade
- Sequel Pro can import/export large DBs much quicker
- works on OSX
- less bloated by not having to support 10+ different db types
Genuine question: when did Redis become a relation db?
I disagree about the UI. Table Plus when connecting to a DB will mark the offending parameter red to let you know what credential isn't right e.g. host/port/key I've found this very helpful.
Sequel Pro is free which you didn't mention and Table Plus has a fee.