Rowy: Open-source Airtable alternative on Google Cloud | Hacker News Reader

Rowy: Open-source Airtable alternative on Google Cloud

rowy.io

283 pointskaranbhangui91 comments

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

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.

I assume the table only renders what is visible, doesn't render everything.

- We only fetch the rows of data as you keep scrolling and render only what you see on screen.

- Since we are built on Firestore database, it is the same DB throttling as what Firestore provides which is 10MB IOPS

- Since we only render what you see on the screen, the UI is very responsive and so can continue can scale.

Hi great work. The website is cool. Can you tell us which CMS / template did you use ?

According to Wappalyzer it's built using Webflow.

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.

What's the business model? I'm confused by the random "alerts" project that's grouped into the same company.

We are trying to build a product that solves for all the pointpoints when you are building on the cloud starting with GCP. And being able to be on top of your cloud expense is a #1 problem we have seen lot of people in the Firebase community complain about and so we want to solve for it as well.

Currently, we are fully open-source and plan to introduce additional PRO features/parallel products in the future.

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.

Apparently they rebranded Firetable to Rowy: https://twitter.com/RowyIO/status/1445296608174690306

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28768261

Firetable is now Rowy but bigger and better :)

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

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.

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

…

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.

…

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.

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!

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

Awesome! Thank you for sharing. This helps.

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.

How do you plan to make money? Consulting?

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!

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)

Baserow founder here. Excited to inform you that we released version 1.6 of Baserow today and that includes the formula field.

Might seem a bit pedantic, but is there a dark mode?

I cannot stare at a white spreadsheet all day unfortunately.

If it helps, Rowy has dark mode :)

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.

Did you try directus.io ?

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] but with a backend component that handles collaborative updates. essentially a stripped down and actively maintained alternative to ethercalc [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.

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

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/

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"?

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.

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.

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...

> The Tables beta is currently available in the U.S.

Why, oh why?

Tables I would image when it is released, should be a great Airtable alternative. With Rowy, we are building an Airtable like experience but your actual database on Firestore. So that developers can continue to build their apps. https://github.com/rowyio/rowy

There’s also https://baserow.io/

BaseRow looks way cooler to me and immediately obvious ie. I know how I would use it.

Thanks for posting.

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.

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

Hey, I’m one of the engineers working on Rowy. We use react-data-grid [1], which has built-in support for virtualized lists rendering. They have demo of a table with 1000 rows and the scrolling stays smooth [2]

[1] https://github.com/adazzle/react-data-grid/ [2] https://adazzle.github.io/react-data-grid/#/common-features

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.

And https://www.nocodb.com/

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.

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

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.

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

Thank you, what analytics are you using with mysql ?

Here's our stack:

RDS MySQL (our production apps, nocodb) -> Alibaba DTS -> Alibaba AnalyticDB for MySQL

it's realtime & easy to setup, operate, and maintain

don't have to create a separate postgresql instance, unlike Baserow

And directus! [0] I’m not affiliated, just love it.

[0] https://directus.io

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.

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

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!

a web frontend for Firebase? sounds too good

Indeed it is :)

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.

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.

Wonder if Rowy could be modified to use Hasura[0], a realtime grahql front-end to Postgres

[0] https://hasura.io

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.