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.
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
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.
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.
(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.)
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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:
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
* "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!