In the past weeks, we conducted lots of interviews with our users community to understand their use cases and what makes Baserow appealing to them. Almost all of them are Airtable users ready to switch to Baserow, therefore we thought we share our findings as you might have similar thoughts. We believe Airtable is a great tool, so this is not about bashing Airtable. We believe many users struggle with the limitations of Airtable for their use cases and the data governance they are faced with. Let’s dive into it!
Our users come both from the public and private sector. They all have similar reasons why they needed a database, rather than a big spreadsheet:
Overall, our users need a collaborative database at the heart of the applications they use to interact with customers, suppliers, scientists, developers or other colleagues. Most users have a level of technical understanding but explicitly told us they want no code tools to simplify their work.
We recognize though that over the years Excel and other spreadsheet-like tools have rooted themselves into the day-to-day workflows of millions of users. That is why Baserow keeps that look and feel of an Excel spreadsheet, while simultaneously offering more functionalities to work with — along with a more user-friendly, and intuitive interface, users can collaborate better, build automation and use much more data types than possible in Excel.
So what is so nice about Baserow that triggered Airtable users to look for an alternative to their Airtable deployment ? Here is what our users tell us:
Sign up: Create a new account in a hosted or self-hosted version. Choose our free, Premium or Advanced version.
Pick up where you left off: Bring your data into Baserow by importing your Airtable data, and continue organizing your data and information.
Invite collaborators: Invite whoever needs to be involved via email and collaborate in real-time. Changes in data are immediately visible.
Today we are releasing Baserow 1.14 with a new security feature — audit log, and big updates to Baserow RBAC that allow assigning roles to users or teams on individual databases and tables for even more granular permission control.