What is the best open source alternatives of Airtable?
As others said, baserow is a good one. Pretty easy to self-host with something like https://malmo.network/store/baserow (founder here)
Bending Spoons makes first post-IPO acquisition with $1.3B Airtable deal
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Re: Bending Spoons makes first post-IPO acquisition with $1.3B Airtable deal
#102Bending Spoons is where products go to die.
You could also phrase it as "Bending Spoons is where dying products go".
Re: Bending Spoons makes first post-IPO acquisition with $1.3B Airtable deal
#103Bending Spoons is where products go to die.
Maybe going against the grain but I think their product philosophy is actually really interesting. They basically just buy the database. Then throw out the crappily built product, with years of tech debt and cruft, and rebuild it leanly, with a small team, low overheads, and ruthlessly optimise for efficiency, and amortise shared in-house resources across the product portfolio. There's a strong logic to that.
> Then throw out the crappily built product, with years of tech debt and cruft, and rebuild it leanly
Which products have they rebuilt? I mostly hear about them selling the existing product at a higher price while reducing the size of the development team.
Re: Bending Spoons makes first post-IPO acquisition with $1.3B Airtable deal
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
yes, _every_ event I go uses Luma or something else nowadays.
Cool that there is something else. There was also EventBrite but I guess that got enshittified as well. Anyway my question was more in the realm of: if people stays, their play works. Not justifying the modus operandi, just stating that there is indeed space for Bending Spoons' MO. Not all the cool hipster SV tech startups end up being a planetary success, some of them end up in this zombie state.
Bending Spoons also bought Eventbrite.
Re: Bending Spoons makes first post-IPO acquisition with $1.3B Airtable deal
#105I have a lot of personal stuff in Airtable. It's really nice software but the company has struggled. Omni, their AI agent was terrible, and yet the founders have doubled down on agents with Hyperagents (nee Superagents). I'm sure Notion DBs ate their lunch, but Coda had the best document database integration I've seen, but they got bought by Superhuman. This entire market space is going to be messy for a while.
You may want to start looking at alternatives. I work at Grist https://getgrist.com, AMA.
Re: Bending Spoons makes first post-IPO acquisition with $1.3B Airtable deal
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
Look at Grist. You maybe justly concerned for it being an open source project that is backed by one small company that sells hosted plans. The difference is that Grist is a core part of the French Government’s open source web applications La Suite https://www.getgrist.com/ https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/produits/grist
Second Grist it is very cool we use a lot of it. You can run python as a column/ cell and it doesn't have a lot of the limitations of Airtable. Usage tiers are ridiculously large. Free api. I am almost hoping they charge more so they stay in business.
Thanks for the mention (I work at Grist)! We want to stay in business, indeed. How much shall we charge? :)
Re: Bending Spoons makes first post-IPO acquisition with $1.3B Airtable deal
#107What is the best open source alternatives of Airtable?
Look at Grist. You maybe justly concerned for it being an open source project that is backed by one small company that sells hosted plans. The difference is that Grist is a core part of the French Government’s open source web applications La Suite https://www.getgrist.com/ https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/produits/grist
By the way, Grist has a very good Airtable migration tool. https://www.getgrist.com/airtable-alternative-self-hosted/
It brings over column types, references, attachments, and simple formulas intact. Even brings over choice/select colors!
Re: Bending Spoons makes first post-IPO acquisition with $1.3B Airtable deal
#108Any suggestion to migrate away from Airtable?
Possibly grist https://www.getgrist.com/blog/grist-v-airtable/ ?
FYI, Grist has a very good Airtable migration tool. Brings over column types, references, simple formulas, attachments etc: https://www.getgrist.com/airtable-alternative-self-hosted/
Re: Bending Spoons makes first post-IPO acquisition with $1.3B Airtable deal
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's used by non technical people so not sure AI is the competition. Perhaps Notion and all the project planning apps like Linear, ClickUp, Asana?
> It's used by non technical people so not sure AI is the competition. I mean yes but most of them are vibe coding apps now > Perhaps Notion and all the project planning apps like Linear, ClickUp, Asana? Most probably, but their market share must have free fall for such valuation
you'd be amazed how little people are vibe coding their apps to have alternatives.
I mean i recently did for a club, but other clubs are still buying the SaaS-solution for 250$ a year, while having more members and i'd assume at least 1 technical person, that knows what they are doing.
Re: Bending Spoons makes first post-IPO acquisition with $1.3B Airtable deal
#110I had some thoughts but for context. Basically, widely reported Airtable's 2026 reported ARR was close to $500M. they sold at a ~3x multiple assuming it went flat/down~~. They had raised $1.4B (total latest around 770M) in funding I am not sure for what?? and had ~1B in cash (according to some online sources)?? Now I have no idea what this is even about, maybe all investors wanted out?
I strongly suspect a big chunk of their revenue was enterprise where it was probably used as a CRUD app / Access replacement with proper controls. That's low hanging fruit for Claude and friends, so their renewals/ARR must have started dropping off and they sold while the selling was good.
That's a really interesting theory! Thanks for surfacing it.
By the way, Grist is Airtable-like and has RBAC down to every row and cell, enforced live. And you can self-host it. Check it out: https://www.getgrist.com/airtable-alternative-self-hosted/
(FYI, I work at Grist.)