Baserow vs NocoDB vs Budibase and List of things needed for baserow to outshine them

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I am a tech founder with over 12 years of building successful startups in ASEAN area . I am also a Python coder / Data Science Enthusiast myself and I am testing various Opensource NoCode/LowCode solutions to help Startups . I love baserow , Baserow is more stable than NocoDB and i had found the code base is well architectured .

But baserow have show stoppers.

After a week of trying out three of them and Problems are.

  • Baserow opensource is most limited of all of them
    • (Show Stopper) Exporting JSON is Premium only feature . The rest of opensource nocode allows it
    • (Show Stopper) Cannot even manage Users at free version , that kind of Limitation is very damaging to opensource version . This could drive away potential premium users.
    • Datasources are limited for automation , no way to get current user.
    • View customization is very weak especially Gallery view , where long texts are Truncated.

Currently Baserow is ok as spreadsheet replacement but it is quite limited in advance usages , . Budibase is currently a killer in features wise even though it doesn’t have an easy to use spreadsheet .

If baserow

  • Reduce Limitation ( Especially JSON export and User Management)
  • Include True nocode features of BudiBase (atleast in Formula/Scripability area since this is python )

it would become a lot better alternative .

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Hello @v3ss0n and welcome to the Baserow community :wave:

Thanks for sharing your honest feedback, we work hard to overbeat our competitors in the functionality, security, and scalability questions, and as you hopefully noticed, huge progress was made in the last months. We couldn’t achieve this progress without users like you, as all the feedback and feature requests help us to move in the right direction.

Here are some comments regarding your suggestions:

We know people are concerned a lot that JSON exporting is a Premium feature, and we made a decision to move it to the Free plan as soon as we have more functionality developed for Premium. For now, we can suggest using one of the CSV to JSON converter tools. Like this one: https://www.convertcsv.com/csv-to-json.htm.

It is possible to manage users in the free version. Using the invite modal, you can invite users, change permissions and remove access on the workspace level instead of the instance level. This should be enough for small teams and this is freely available.

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With the premium version, you get to manage all users in your instance which is particularly useful when a large organization needs to disable someone’s account, for example.

Can you elaborate a bit more in detail regarding this suggestion?

This is because the cards in the Gallery view must be equal in height. Do you have any suggestions on how we can solve this problem?

The majority of our time, we spend on developing free, open source features. But we also need to work on the Premium offering, as this model funds our team and ensures we release new free features quickly.

We believe that our current goal is different from Budibase. We have a big mission to build a no-code toolchain that will include app builder and automation modules, but for now, we work on the database part only. You can check out this interview with our founder Bram to see what are the plans for the Baserow future: https://techround.co.uk/interviews/a-chat-with-bram-wiepjes-baserow/.

And thank you for your kind words about Baserow, we appreciate it a lot :blue_heart:

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Thank you very much for the decision to allow JSON export.

CSV To JSON Converter.

I know there are CSV tools , but ability to export to CSV is very limited . You should try compataitor’s export feature and compare. For example , Budibase can export whole organization or whole app , including all the configrations as json , not just table schema but all application configs. That is very much needed feature .

Last time i tried i can only invite and can set only one admin.

In budibase , there are many flexible datasource options , for example , you can get current loggedin user’s email / ID , even add more schema to current user . Get the userlist and work with it. It works both as internal and public platform

I understand , since i am also a Seasoned Python Fullstack Developer / Devops , 80% of my time I would like to see a python+django tool with superior architecture succeed .

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Hello @v3ss0n! Thanks for your activity :raised_hands:

It’s possible to have multiple admins in a workspace, please check the section Set the permission level for collaborators in the user documentation to get more details.

Thanks for adding the example. Is the described functionality related to the Audit log feature? Where an admin can see all the changes that were made in an app by all other users.

Thanks for your understanding! Our developers work with the notion of clean code. We have a clear architecture, and comprehensive documentation; we separate all coding processes to make it easy to extend the platform as we grow.

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No, its like this.

As a developer , I am only interested in the tasks that i am assigned to do after logged in

As a Project Manager , I am only responsible on the tasks that i owns

As an Admin , i can assign slack / zulip ID on each of my users so i can do automation to notify a task to related users when assigned on baserow.

I am able to do that on Budibase and now we run our own internal project management system.

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Yes i already checked out and modified both backend and frontend , solid architecture . Several times better than nocodb in terms of code quality.

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