APITable: open-source Airtable alternative | Hacker News Reader

APITable: open-source Airtable alternative

github.com

303 pointschepy78 comments

Open articleView on HN

I see some serious red flags on their homepage:

* "Partners" just seem to be logo-hijacking potential hosting platforms (not actual partnerships)

* Most of the links in the footer don't work

* The testimonials use fake names + stock art

* API keys checked into a public repo

* Seems to be built by (or somehow associated with) this company (hhttps://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/312911-47), but with no links back

Please be careful using this product. Not trying to be insulting; but if you're going to use it I'd make sure you install it locally.

That being said, I love this as a concept. Airtable is so so nice as a backend/DB for simple sites, and I'm intrigued by an open source competitor!

> * The testimonials use fake names + stock art

Wtf this is true. Reverse google image search the testimonials and you'll see the same. This blows my mind how sketchy it is. Just get your friends to put testimonials. If you have 3 users that you begged to use your product, get them to review. Fake reviews is beyond scummy.

That said, anyone know what template they use for their landing page? It's nice.

> Airtable is so so nice as a backend/DB for simple sites, and I'm intrigued by an open source competitor!

https://baserow.io/

Looks interesting but it’s only open-core: loads of important features locked behind subscription pricing, plus you lose the ability to self-host: https://baserow.io/pricing

It's kind of hard to compare the long lists on mobile but I couldn't see any features removed when you self host. What did I miss?

Yeah not easy to see on mobile. Their 5/user/mo “premium” plan adds

Features: - XML and JSON export (vs just CSV) - Row comments - Row coloring - Public logo removal

Views: - Kanban - Survey - Calendar (WIP) - Gantt (WIP)

10k rows, 5Gb storage per group.

The “Advanced” $20/user/mo plan adds:

Feature: Role-based Permissions

Support 100k rows, 20GB storage per group

You will not lose any features by self-hosting. Quite the opposite, some enterprise features like SSO are only possible for self-hosted instances. Source: I work for Baserow.

Is there an ongoing trend of sketchy "OSS" product offerings using this same website layout and similar fake quotes from users? I feel like I'm seeing this a lot recently.

edit: through "product hunt"?

further edit: looks like this isn't new: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29864157 maybe it's just gotten worse and I've noticed it or its "products" in my feeds recently

Initial commit was in August and there are only 5 contributors, yet it's calling itself the "the best Airtable alternative" and filled their side with all kind of fancy screenshots? Makes it even more sketchy. Unless they ported the whole project from a previous project, there would be no way to barf out a high quality competition in such a short time with such a small team.

Without the screenshots and partner-claims I would think they are just overly enthusiastic. But the whole highly professional sales vibes for such a fresh project makes it just untrustable.

Apparently they're scraping emails from people that starred Bitwarden and then sending out misleading emails that appear to be from Bitwarden...

https://dev.to/cppshane/shady-marketing-apitable-is-scraping...

It’s also AGPL licensed but has incompatibly-licensed dependencies.

Can you point to any specific incompatibility? Most OS licensed code can be used as a dependency in AGPL code.

(A bit sad with the dubious marketing; hopefully they can get around to remove it or finish it with real testimonials as it obviously generates a negative reaction that completely overshadows the actual fairly impressive product.)

Did anyone get the "Gitpod Online Demo" to work?

https://gitpod.io/#https://github.com/apitable/apitable

Takes well over 2 minutes to start up and then asks for a username/password which is written under installation: admin@apitable.com / Apitable2022

As far as I can see it is a somewhat buggy but interesting and comprehensive product. Instead of relying on Gitpod for demo, I would buy some dedicated, faster hosting and make a demo that didn't require a login.

wow yeah this is as strong of an AVOID signal as it gets.

These keys are revoked in earlier time. They are samples. The official team have remove secrets, tokens and keys.

Is it just me or is this category of product exploding right now?

Here, a list of similar tools that let you easily make a data model and generate some descent UI from it ?

https://budibase.com/ https://baserow.io/ https://directus.io/ https://strapi.io/ https://nocodb.com/ https://keystonejs.com/ https://saltcorn.com/ https://www.plasmic.app/ https://www.appsmith.com/ https://www.jigdev.com/ https://www.sanity.io/ https://www.jetadmin.io/ https://dashibase.com/ https://cortezaproject.org/

The above are only the open source ones with a descent number of GitHub stars. I can't think of another time when I found so much competition in one product category. Or am I mistaken and this is not special?

Isnt there some joke that every month a new starup tries to reinvent pivot tables?

and here i am just sticking with MySQL for the past 20 years.. hasn't failed me yet

yes but there are billions of people out there who need a low code alternative

yes it's called pay someone to do it

There's also https://github.com/illacloud/illa-builder.

Only Retool alternative I have found so far that's not AGPL encumbered or open core.

What's wrong with AGPL? It's copyleft, that's intentional so it can't really be considered a flaw. Are there other issues?

You can't deployed the apps generated in any useful business capacity so it is not truly free except for a minority of personal users (or if you are in a country where IP rights are not easily enforced).

These platforms' primary customers and audience are enterprises and companies. The open source part is a red herring. It is not "free" to use in any sense for most organizations unless you are a non-profit with a majority of network infrastructure being under copyleft software. Don't be disingenuous, there is a very big difference for a web application builder and PaaS under rigorous viral copyleft vs e.g. a generic web server that will never be seen or utilized directly by users.

Are you confusing AGPL with SSPL?

AGPL makes something free as in "non-encumberable", it doesn't leave you free to do more or less whatever you want with it like the MIT or BSD licenses.

Right, that's the point of the license. Essentially it stops other people from taking your code, packaging it as an app and selling it. Using it in your own business is fine though.

I’ve noticed that productivity tooling has been exploding in recent years. Note taking is another similar category where there is a ton of competition. Things were already ramping up pre-COVID, but ever since the WFH movement started, I’ve gotten the sense that there has been a lot of monetary investment in this space.

Add budibase too, it's very stable and feature packed

I simply don't know what they're doing with their marketing strategies. Do they really think sending promotion emails in the name of unrelated popular products (claiming they're tied to bitwarden in email subject) will work?

I received an email like [this](https://imgur.com/a/CVAhQvs) weeks ago. At first I was worried that bitwarden had leaked my email address, but then I found that the mail address that got the mail was not used for bitwarden registration. APITable seems to be using the name "bitwarden" in email subject to disguise as an email from a trustworthy product, so that receivers will open the email and see their ad.

Definitely a shameful way of self-promotion.

some discussion also on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitwarden/comments/zeqpd6/is_bitwar...

Yeah, they're apparently getting user emails from people who starred Bitwarden on GitHub.

See my reply to the post above.

I hope you've reissued the secret keys you accidentally checked in (as you can see them in the PR diffs). Cool project!

This alone doesn't fill me with much confidence. Such a basic opsec error.

Eh, mistakes happen. For me it's all about how they're handled.

And, so far, it's been handled pretty damn crap.

These keys are revoked in earlier time. They are samples. The official team have remove secrets, tokens and keys.

I am looking for a low-code system where I could easily add code for custom business logic (on the backend) when needed. Most of these systems seem well-suited to reading data, but don't seem suitable to writing it for non-trivial use cases.

pocketbase.io has some hooks for when data is saved, but currently only supports SQLite as a backend.

Directus seems to have some custom validation ability.

All these systems don't seem to have a way to add custom validation logic:

https://appwrite.io/docs/getting-started-for-web https://github.com/appsmithorg/appsmith https://docs.openblocks.dev/build-apps/event-handlers#compon... https://docs.budibase.com/docs/contextual-bindings https://docs.tooljet.com/docs/contributing-guide/setup/archi...

have you considered PayloadCMS? it has hooks for nearly any situation imaginable: https://payloadcms.com/docs/hooks/overview

not affiliated in any way

You can add custom validation in budibase by writing JavaScript. But Django is best low code platform for me.

Looks very promising from the landing page... but the one click gitpod instance is localised in a language that I don't speak. (Mandarin? Thai?). Is there English language support available, and if so, how does one turn it on?

This!

By translating a lot of things I was able to reach an options panel with a language setting, among the options there was "English (beta)" and clicking on it restarts the UI but nothing changes.

It is Simplified Chinese. English doesn't work.

Which means these "screenshot gifs" are almost certainly fake: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/apitable/apitable/develop/...

Airtable was so cool when I tried it years ago but it was insufferably slow. Just unusable as are many web apps these days unfortunately

We use Airtable a lot with work projects; I also use it for some personal stuff - a web-available relational database is very convenient. But yup, it’s still slow as molasses.

Are they mostly for marketing? I have never needed something like Airtable, so just curious.

I have used it as a simple CRM for a small organization, it was a big improvement on the earlier method of using Google sheets.

No, it’s very flexible. If you need to present complex relational data to clients in an easily digestible form, it has some nice tooling around that now in addition to basic views - Interfaces, they’re called. It doesn’t have the permissions granularity of rolling your own, but it’s surprisingly useful. We also built a custom CRM in it.

I also use it for personal things like aggregating transaction histories across financial institutions, personal contact management, etc. Although Notion has eaten its lunch a bit here imo.

Turns out that a web-available relational database is pretty useful.

Is there an ongoing trend of sketchy "OSS" product offerings using this same website layout and similar fake quotes from users? I feel like I'm seeing this a lot recently.

What's the angle? How would somebody exploit people through offering a sketchy OSS product?

Investment. There are multiple VC groups trying to fund products in this space and using GitHub and other metrics to pick targets

There are? How do I find these VCs?

Also try out NocoDB as a good air table alternative.

actually, they are totally for different use right? nocodb cant be a true airtable alternative as its design is for database manipulation

Before they get too far along they should consider changing the name. Airtable would probably have a good trademark infringement case that it’s confusingly similar.

You really think so? “Table” is common database vernacular and “API” is the most generic term in all of software these days. APITable also sounds nothing like Airtable and doesn’t even have similar connotations. Gonna have to disagree with you, but open to hearing more context for your thought if you care to expand

> doesn’t even have similar connotations

IMHO their tagline is "Open source & Airtable alternative" so they're trying to make a connection

This is great but I have trouble running it, so I just opened a couple PRs and bug reports.

Thanks for releasing this!

We will fix it. Day 1 for us.

Airtable was a really cool startup when they came out in 2012. There was nothing else like it. Now, with their mass layoffs, and free alternatives, it makes you wonder if they can survive as a company.

I have an account and I've tried to use it. It's never been clear to me who their paid customer is - though obviously they've found a ton of customers, so this is nothing more than my own curiosity.

The entry-level paid plan is limited to 5000 rows, so it's not a substitute for an SQL database. If I want to capture data in this type of app with a few hundred rows, why not use a spreadsheet, which everyone already knows how to use and already has installed? For other uses, Trello significantly overlaps, but with a simpler interface. Put differently, why pay for Airtable unless you need a performant way to manage a significant amount of data?

I’m using it for internal business process stuff. Like keeping track of client deliverables, events, things like that.

It’s basically the next step when you’re annoyed with Google Sheets for that kind of thing. The advantage is that it’s just super quick and easy to use for normal people that want to go one step past a normal excel type spreadsheet into something with a little bit of automation or custom views.

They're a $10B+ company now. Incredible, isn't it?

According to the $1.4B they raised. Love the product but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

I don't see the point of this. Airtable sucks at anything except providing a managed database you can store a small amount of data in for free. If you have to do the hosting yourself, just choose postgres.

Is there a user-friendly web interface for Postgres that you recommend? A database on its own isn’t really a replacement for Airtable.

We're building one – our first release is coming early 2023: https://github.com/centerofci/mathesar

You can get a non-technical person to spin up a Postgres database to do something like keep track of ad campaign run dates or client deliverables or whatever?

This looks awesome. Really well done and certainly well presented!

For those who have tried, how does this compare to other Airtable alternatives like Nocodb, Baserow, Seatable, etc?

It doesn’t work. The screenshots appear to be aspirational as opposed to a real product at this point.

Looks good, are they going to offer a hosted model? I couldn't find pricing on their website, just an email sign-up.

Airtable's pricing just didn't work for me as an individual user - $$$s per month even for a simple table with ~2000 rows. At least Google had the good sense to make it accessible to individuals, because those same people then go on to make decisions at work.

Google, with the monopoly profits it commands in search, can afford to subsidize everything else. A startup that does one thing cannot.

It appears to be a new open-source project.

What shocked me the most is that this APITable has rich features and high quality product interface at such an early stage.

I guess there's a professional team behind them.

This is fantastic - can’t wait to try it out!

nocodb seatable are good options

the best air table alternative is google sheets

Nonsense, it’s obviously emacs.

In what way? Google Sheets doesn't offer nearly the same set of functionality without a lot of extra scripting work on top. Also, it isn't open source.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com