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Comment by samanator | Hacker News Reader

> The actual CRM part (basically tables of data with a UI) is trivial

Although I agree with the general sentiment, I disagree with this. I've tried out over 100 low-code ui builder over the past year (including creatio,Corteza,ERPNext,Baserow,tadabase,appsmith,nocodb,mathesar,bubble, etc.) and so far none of them have perfected "excel like ease with the power of a database".

If anyone has any suggestions, (that's not on my list https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15Pg6y11JscBMK-PK06f7... ), please let me know!

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2 competitors which I think are getting things right on the UI front are Attio [1] and Folk [2]. It's not as powerful as Salesforce and the data structure is very loose, but they have done a good job with the user-experience. They are not open source though.

[1] https://attio.com [2] https://www.folk.app

It looks like a near clone of what Attio is doing.

The trendsetter here is Notion, not Attio

One of my requirements is that I must be able to host the database myself :-) (with a preference for Postgres)

No one’s going to sell you just a UI

You seem to be missing Coda ( https://coda.io ) which (in my experience) comes remarkably close to “Excel with data powers”. Think of Notion’s document editing and tables, but with _much_ more power, a proper formula language, UI widgets, etc. The Coda team have churned out a ton of amazing features in remarkably short time. The main drawback I’ve encountered: no obvious way to separate code and data. I can’t find a way to version/clone one without the other while keeping the data in Coda. However there are plenty of integrations with external data sources, so keeping a chunk of the data external may be the best way.

EDIT: Oops, forgot to thank you for creating this amazingly comprehensive sheet. I’m looking for a similar thing myself: a self-hostable CRM for a small team that wants some flexibility around custom fields and automation but doesn’t need most of the other common CRM features. My current plan is to try AppSmith, but there are a bunch of entries in your sheet that I haven’t seen before. Thanks again!

Also missing these app builders, both of which are open source but offer managed hosting:

* Budibase https://budibase.com * ToolJet https://www.tooljet.com

They’re both more of the AppSmith/Retool sort of thing than Excel, but may be worth a look anyway.

FWIW, Budibase also has it's own multiplayer database that allows users to build workflows akin to Airtable.

I'm the cofounder of Budibase.

and https://windmill.dev

Check out https://lowdefy.com

We’ve built Lowdefy as a config webstack. Making it really easy to build web apps with yaml or json. You can also extend with npm plugins.

Lowdefy is more low level than a crm. But we’ve used it to build advanced CRMs for enterprises.

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