Worth solving my own problems?
Hi everyone,
I really enjoy working with Airtable. Lately automated some internal processes for staff planning. It became the default tool to kick off projects requiring an underlying database that can be accessed via an intuitive table UI.
However, the more I am building with Airtable I am missing two critical features:
- More advanced user rights management
- Real world example:
- Record A contains work schedule information for employee A.
- Record B contains this type of information for employee B.
- Employee A is able to see and change information in record A only.
- Employee B is able to see but not change information in record B only.]
- Real world example:
- Git like version control
Right now I am thinking about building an alternative that solves these problems.
What are your thoughts on this idea? Looking forward to exchanging thoughts.
see if you can build on https://baserow.io/ - its open source alternative to airtable.
Thanks for pointing towards baserow.io @nshkrsh. Already encountered it and definitely an interesting OS project.
Are you using it? If so, I am curious what made you switch from airtable to the this alternative.
using neither currently. just a helpful nudge.
using good old MySQL/Maria with Wappler (visual web app builder).
the control and flexibility out clients want over data are best met with a low code tool with direct DB interaction.
Interesting, haven't heard of Wappler before but looks very powerful with a whole bunch of features integrated. Also the fact that one can stack it on top of a well established db, like you do it, sounds good.
What kind of applications are you building with that stack?
We're building web apps for clients in fintech, health, retail - for internal use and customer facing both.
Not much of it is in public domain though!
A b2b website https://jgrnaut.in is something you can see (this is customer facing, we also built the underlying admin panel with fairly complex business rules to manage the website content).
Are you going to build an app with those 2 features and compete with airtable or are you doing to build it on top of airtable?
@net2tim Building on top of airtable seems not feasible to me since the features I am missing would tackle some core functionalities.
I'm rather thinking about an alternative that covers some of the airtable features like underlying db, intuitive table UI, different views per table and combining it with the features pointed out above.
What are your experiences with airtable?
Hey @LukSteib would love to hear your thought about my product which I build with lack of features of airtable. You can try it on retable.io . Let me know if i can help you to help you as much as I can.
I don't have experience in airtable.
Do you think you can compete just with the 2 additional features? Have many airtable users raised this issue?
If you are solving your own problem and you can do it pretty fast, go ahead and create a MVP that solves your problem. Then you can let others use it to see if there are many interests:-)