How does this compare to Nocodb, Baserow, and Mathesar?
Launch HN: Outerbase (YC W23) – A new UI and editor for your database
61–70 of 116 posts
Re: Launch HN: Outerbase (YC W23) – A new UI and editor for your database
#62so outerbox connects directly to the db without using a bridge service like Mode does?
meh, i don’t want to allow inbound connections from the internet.
i absolutely hate mode, but i liked their bridge connector.
Re: Launch HN: Outerbase (YC W23) – A new UI and editor for your database
#63Great launch guys! What is the difference between Retool, Basedash and Outerbase other than they are all funded by YC?
Basedash founder here. We're much more focused on admin panels that you would give to non-technical teammates (e.g. support, ops, sales) to view & edit data. Less around data analysis and charts, though we have a bit of that. We're also not limited to databases, you can set up actions to hit APIs (e.g. Stripe, SendGrid, internal APIs).
Re: Launch HN: Outerbase (YC W23) – A new UI and editor for your database
#64This looks very interesting. Who do you think is your target user? Why did you not decide to go down the open source route - not being critical, just curious.
Yeah we have gone back and forth a lot about the open-source route, and still talk about it frequently. Our target audience is non-technical team members so the thought of open-sourcing didn't make a ton of sense from that standpoint.
However, it does make sense for their technical team members to launch this for them and give them access to the data.
Re: Launch HN: Outerbase (YC W23) – A new UI and editor for your database
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Currently we allow databases to whitelist our IP address and access from anywhere. For internal databases we do offer VPN and on-prem (Dockerized) solutions for our enterprise customers. Private databases that are on localhost we don't _currently_ support on our native Mac app but it's on our roadmap!
Downloaded your "native Mac app" Turns out it's just Electron Disappointed. Will stick to TablePlus
Yeah I get it. We wanted to get a local version out there as it's what a lot of people want, but as you can imagine a full native mac app takes a ton of time to deliver.
We thought Electron would be a nice interim until we go down the route further.
I know Electron doesn't get a lot of love, is it the file size, the UX, or what about it makes it less desirable for you?
Re: Launch HN: Outerbase (YC W23) – A new UI and editor for your database
#66Will this be the interface that I need? Mathesar ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34999774 ) was the last one I tried out but it couldn't support more than 250k rows without crashing and required foreign keys in order to infer relationships. Otherwise it's exactly what I want. An Excel/Airtable interface around a raw database connection. How does Outerbase compare? Edit: Mistypes
Mathesar core team member here. I don't want to distract from Outerbase's launch, but if you have time, would you be able to open an issue for the crash at https://github.com/centerofci/mathesar ? We're still in alpha and relying on people checking out the project to report problems like these so we can fix them. Also, relationships without foreign keys is on our roadmap: https://github.com/centerofci/mathesar/discus…
Sure! I'll file it this weekend.
Re: Launch HN: Outerbase (YC W23) – A new UI and editor for your database
#67Regarding pricing: do you offer monthly subscriptions for "view-only" users? Here's my use-case. I am fine paying $50 a month for someone to make dashboards, create queries, etc. However, that's too much (and significantly above other tools) for the "users" of the product: for example, salespeople who I would like to enable to see what products their customers have used. I'd expect something in the 10-20 range per he…
Great point — I love the idea of creators vs viewers. We are looking into building out a view-only mode that would be much more affordable. Potentially even embedded experiences so you could share reports internally without needing to actually log into Outerbase. Would that solve your use case?
Yes, a view-only mode would work. Ideally it would not just be a static view, but would allow users to run some queries (perhaps constrained?) on the table, so they can get a list of their customers who ordered last quarter but not this quarter, for example, or other similar queries.
But disallowing them from modifying the DB would be fine.
Maybe limiting it to tables established by the Creator, and with a certain View/Dashboard arrangement, would work.
Re: Launch HN: Outerbase (YC W23) – A new UI and editor for your database
#68Great launch guys! What is the difference between Retool, Basedash and Outerbase other than they are all funded by YC?
what is basedash, and what is "an admin panel", i visited their site and google for like 10 minutes and still no clue what this is retool is a rad platfrom, i found it when i was looking for an MS lightswitch replacement, so its clear what it is also outerbase is a bit strange, its a cloud db interface and the download link is for mac (not windows, mac) , the use cases seem very particular (niche) to me
Yeah we had a windows version as well, it was a bit buggy so we decided to launch without it.
I'm curious why does use case sound niche? We love to think that giving everyone access to data is a pretty big challenge to solve. Is it in our messaging or do you think the overall vision is off? Would love to understand how we could be more clear in what we are providing.
Re: Launch HN: Outerbase (YC W23) – A new UI and editor for your database
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
It appears like your fix didn't work It now just redirects to the auth page. Clicked on the back button in my browser and voilà https://imgur.com/a/EvMaVu9
Hmm I wonder if this is a caching issue. It seems to be working on our part and no data is ever loaded. If you'd be willing to talk through a bit further I'd love to. brayden [at] outerbase [dot] com.
Assuming you use a token similar to JWT , then redirects and removing the token from the client don’t matter if you don’t blacklist the token on the backend, which if they were able to continue by hitting the back button seems the case. This does require you to keep a database of “logged-out” tokens and reject them, and occasionally run a cleanup script on the db to prune tokens from that table after they would have expired, but that’s what is required when you use auth tokens for login.
Re: Launch HN: Outerbase (YC W23) – A new UI and editor for your database
#70"Databases are usually locked down to a few team members..." Not true in my experience. True at very large / very mature companies, but at any In that same vein, in a small company environment you don't harass engineers with query requests, you learn SQL . I've seen hundreds of non-technical users do this (and helped many of them), it's not unusual. Visual query-building tools never help. Even good interfaces like Lo…
That's a fair comment, If anything them not being locked down makes access to databases easier to connect to Outerbase.
I agree that users should learn SQL, even when you use EZQL it returns the actual SQL in a fully-editable IDE that can be modified in whatever way you would want.
Do you think that the existing tools out there provide a good environment for those non-technical teams to learn SQL?
Maybe I'm biased but I have never been a huge fan of accessing data from the majority of the existing tools as they feel outdated and like tools built mostly for engineers.