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Released open source Airtable alternative

The code of Baserow has been released publicly under the MIT license. It has always been the plan for Baserow to be commercial open source software. After writing lots of documentation the past few weeks, the code has finally been made public.

Official repository: https://gitlab.com/bramw/baserow
Release blog post: https://baserow.io/blog/open-source-release-of-baserow
Developer documentation: https://baserow.io/docs/index
API documentation: https://api.baserow.io/api/redoc/

Baserow is an open source online database tool and Airtable competitor. The software is still in an early alpha phase, but everyone can try it out now. You can use docker-compose to quickly spin up a demo or you can try the SaaS version at https://baserow.io.

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    Hello,

    Amazing work, I was looking for an open-source AirTable alternative for a long time and didn't find anything like it. This week I started developing one by myself and accidentally found this project :D

    I ran the demo on my machine and works fine. However it still feels very alpha, for example there are 5 only data types supported at this point.

    Are you planning on building a community? I would like to contribute to this project.

    1. 1

      Baserow is still in a very early phase, so I can understand that is feels like an alpha version for you. Right now I am working on the feature where you can link a field's value to the row of another table. There is definitely going to be a community. If you like to contribute maybe you can let me know on which kind of things you would like to work and with which tools, framework, programming languages etc you have experience in.

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    I really like the website style and concept, it's nice.

    I use Airtable and one of the issues I have with it right now for my use case is that it's not suited to having browser clients using the API directly. I think there is a separate product, Flairtable, which addresses some of this.

    I could consider switching if the API was better than Airtable, especially in that respect.

    I also don't pay for it right now so it wouldn't be high value if I did switch!

    Good luck!

  3. 1

    Congrats mate. If you don't mind, curious to learn

    1. Where do you run baserow itself?
    2. What's the encryption process for data stored in Postgres?
    3. Any other advice wrt architecture that you would like to give (for people who are building SaaS products)

    Thanks.

    1. 1

      Thanks!

      1. The infrastructure of Baserow runs at Digital Ocean. The setup has a Kuberneter cluster with two nodes each having 2vCPU and 2GB ram and a managed PostgreSQL DB having 1vCPU and 1GB ram. Did a stress test recently and it can handle about 400 active users using the tool simultaneously before the responses slowed down.
      2. Of course the connection with the database server is encrypted via SSL. Everyone that wants to connect with the database server has to be IP whitelisted. In order to add an address to the whitelist you need 2FA. I think it is a good idea to offer encrypted data storage, but that feature doesn't exist now. It would mean that the user needs to remember an decryption key to access his data. If that key is lost then the data is lost. The whole decryption process could happen on the client side so it stays secure. The only reason I can come up with for someone to actually need this is because they don't trust us with their data in the SaaS environment at https://baserow.io. Those people do have the option right now to self host.
      3. Advise on the code architecture or the infrastructure?
      1. 1

        Thanks for your response. 3rd point would you like to give any advice on the architecture (meaning any pitfalls that you potentially ran into before sticking to what you described above)

  4. 1

    This is pretty awesome! Good luck with the rest of your roadmap.

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    This comment was deleted 4 years ago.

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      That is unfortunate. Can you tell me a little bit more about the error? Maybe I can help fixing the issue.

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    This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

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        This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

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          Right now Baserow is in a very early phase and Airtable has more features. The main differences are related to the flexibility. If Airtable would go open source, that would be very bad for Baserow right now. A support page on the Airtable website states the following: "Can Airtable be hosted on-premise? Airtable is a cloud-based SaaS product, and we do not plan on offering an on-premise or self-hosted solution." so I don't expect this, let alone that they open source their software.

          A few USP are listed below:

          • Open source.
          • Can be self hosted.
          • Supports plugin. You can create custom fields, views, applications, endpoints etc.
          • Unlimited rows. Airtable is limited to 50k.
          • Has been build around PostgreSQL which is a relational database.
          • The interface is faster if you have lots of data because the pagination, filtering, sorting etc is handled by the backend instead of the frontend.
          • I have plans for Baserow to become a complete no-code toolchain. The database/table part is just the beginning.
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