Google Sheets is often seen as the de facto spreadsheet tool for many users around the world. Part of Google’s free, web-based Google Docs Editors suite, it lets you create, edit, and collaborate on spreadsheets in real-time through any PC, tablet, or mobile.
Used by businesses of all sizes, Google Sheets has lots of great features, like built-in templates, pivot tables, and conditional formatting. No special software is required to create spreadsheets directly in your browser. And because it’s cloud-based, your files are accessible anywhere there’s an internet connection.
Despite its benefits, there are some disadvantages to working with Google Sheets. Read on to find out more about why some companies don’t (and can’t) use the software, and what the best Google Sheets alternatives are for teams and businesses of all sizes.
- Baserow
- Microsoft Excel
- Zoho Sheet
- Apache OpenOffice Calc
- Airtable
- Jotform Tables
- ClickUp
- LibreOffice
Why you need an alternative to Google Sheets
While it’s widely used, Google Sheets has a many downsides to using it individually, with your teams, and for your business. Even though it retains familiarity to Microsoft Excel, some functionality can be complicated and difficult to grasp for beginners. Additionally, loading times can be slow, even when working with just a few hundred rows of data.
Not only are there some limitations in terms of how much data you can work with, there are also limits to what you can do with it. If you handle large volumes of data, and work with lots of different formulas, then you definitely need to look at the best alternatives to Google Sheets.
From a spreadsheet perspective, some businesses will not use Google Sheets for any projects requiring more than listing raw data. In terms of features and functionality, some users say that the software falls short of Microsoft Excel and other top alternatives such as Baserow, Zoho Sheet, and ClickUp.
In many cases, businesses are completely unable to use Google Sheets (and other Google-related products) due to to data governance, legal, and compliance issues.
Is there anything better than Google Sheets?
There are lots of other options that may be a better fit for you than Google Sheets. Baserow, for example, offers similar functionality to a traditional spreadsheet but allows for much more scope for non-technical teams and businesses to build, customize, and manage databases and applications.
Microsoft Excel may also be better suited than Google Sheets for business use. It lets you create, format, and share spreadsheets easily. However, Excel lacks features like role-based access control (RBAC), self-hosting, and audit logs, which can result in huge losses and even legal and compliance headaches.
Want to find out more about the best alternatives to Google Sheets? Read on for the best options to help you supercharge your work.
Top Google Sheets alternatives for teams and businesses
1. Baserow
Hailed as the best open-source alternative to Google Sheets, Baserow offers awesome features on its hosted and self-hosted plans. The user-friendly platform makes it possible for individuals and businesses to build databases and applications collaboratively, quickly, and efficiently.
It’s a no-code platform, meaning you can create workable applications without any technical experience. It organizes all of your data into tables that are easy to create, collaborate on and look through. And because it’s API-first, it can be easily integrated with an array of tools.
Even though Baserow gives you the power of a relational database, it has the ease of use and familiarity of a spreadsheet. Bringing together the best of both worlds boasts a powerful combination that’s tough to beat.
Import an existing file or use one of Baserow’s many templates to get started. Drag and drop your files to tables, make fast calculations, and create relationships between tables by linking them together. Collaboration is easy thanks to link sharing and comments. Plus, you can visualize and customize your data using a variety of views like Gallery View, Grid View, Calendar View, Kanban View, Form View, Survey View, and more.
Compared to Google Sheets, Baserow is super fast. You can easily work with 100,000+ rows per table without any problems. It also lets you build your own public form, share it with the world, and have responses sync to your tables in real-time.
Perfect if you’re working with big volumes of data, Baserow’s full-featured platform is built for scaling, speed, and stability.
Features, pros, and cons
- Easy to build and scale databases.
- Create full-scale applications.
- Collaborate in real-time.
- Performant at scale.
- Capacity for hundreds of thousands (or even millions!) of rows.
- Robust data management features and formulas.
- Manipulate your data with many useful views (Grid View, Calendar View, Gallery View, Kanban View, Form View, Survey View).
- API-first and developer-friendly for easy integrations with other tools and platforms.
- Build and share public forms to easily capture data internally or externally.
- Baserow Self-Hosted: full data governance and compliance.
- Open source: Hosted and on-premise self-hosted options with a generous free plan.
- Set role-based access controls (RBAC) for granular permissions.
2. Microsoft Excel
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Microsoft Excel is arguably the most well-known spreadsheet application around. It’s a valuable tool for creating formulas and using its native visualization functionality to create graphs and charts. It also works well for creating pivot tables and other calculations.
The software is similar in that both Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel have core spreadsheet features. Google Sheets offers more in the way of collaboration, but the processing speed of Excel is faster, making it better if you’re dealing with higher volumes of data.
Microsoft Excel has more data visualization options, and its formulas are more customizable with features like pivot tables and array formulas. If your business requires more functionality for calculations and analysis, then Excel is the better option compared to Google Sheets.
Overall, Excel is a good Google Sheets alternative, but you’ll need a Microsoft subscription to get it. Some users experience frequent bugs with Excel, and collaboration is harder. However, it has more advanced functions, it’s faster, and its charting options are superior.
Features, pros, and cons
- Has advanced functions like XLOOKUP.
- Can work with relatively large volumes of data.
- Better for calculations and analysis.
- Good features like pivot tables and array formulas.
- Not designed for collaborative work.
- No free version.
- Prone to human error.
- Not open source.
- Lacks relational/linking abilities.
3. Zoho Sheet
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Zoho Sheet is a free online spreadsheet application that makes it easy for users to create, edit, share, and collaborate on spreadsheets. It’s great for those who want easy-to-use software, making it ideal for casual and professional users alike.
A good free alternative to Google Sheets, it offers everything you come to expect from a spreadsheet in one place. Being a part of the Zoho workspace platform, it offers some powerful reporting and analytics tools that help translate data into valuable and actionable reports. It also integrates nicely with the rest of the Zoho ecosystem.
When comparing the two solutions, some users found Zoho Sheet easier to use. It comes with a handy AI-powered assistant called Zia who can help you understand and manage your data. Zia can fetch information, take notes as you dictate, predict outcomes of sales activities, automate mundane tasks, and much more.
Features, pros, and cons
- Designed with collaboration in mind.
- Deep integrations with the rest of the Zoho ecosystem.
- Good automation features.
- Better privacy policy than Google.
- Create your own functions.
- Comes with a personal data analyst.
- Interface can be confusing and unfamiliar at times.
- Keyboard shortcuts are different from other mainstream services.
- Free plan has limited features.
4. Apache OpenOffice Calc
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Part of the OpenOffice ecosystem, Open Office Calc is an electronic spreadsheet program that’s a part of six other OpenOffice applications; word processor, spreadsheets, presentations, diagrams, databases, and formulas. Of all the Google Sheets alternatives mentioned, individuals and small businesses alike can make good use of Open Office Calc.
Newbies find it easy to get the hang of, while professionals appreciate advanced features like DataPilot, which lets you pull in raw data from corporate databases, then cross-tabulate, summarize, and convert it into meaningful information.
Its Intelligent Sum Button inserts a sum function or a subtotal automatically, depending on context. And its Wizards feature guides you through the process of using advanced spreadsheet functions. There’s also a good range of templates for ready-made spreadsheet solutions.
Features, pros, and cons
- Free and open source.
- Supports a variety of formats.
- Intuitive and easy to use.
- Good formatting and calculation tools.
- User interface is quite basic.
- No cloud save options available.
- Does not allow upgrades.
- Not the best solution for large or complex documents.
- Limited native integrations available.
5. Airtable
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Like Baserow, Airtable is a relational database platform that’s packed with features for creating customizable databases and applications. It has the operational familiarity of a spreadsheet, but it offers tons more in terms of functionality because it’s a relational database rather than a spreadsheet.
Unlike traditional spreadsheet software, Airtable lets you create connections between your data by linking records across tables. You can input dates, attachments, single select fields, formulas, and more. It also boasts useful views like Grid, Gallery, Gantt, Timeline, Form, and more.
Google Sheets has a free version with a 10 million record limit and up to 100 collaborators. In comparison, Airtable’s free plan is limited to only 5 collaborators. After that, it can quickly get expensive, depending on the plan you choose.
If you’re looking for Google Sheets alternatives on a comparable level to Airtable, we actually think Baserow is the better option. Yes, we may be biased, but Baserow is a better-value product. With Baserow, you get nearly identical functionality to Airtable, but at virtually half the price. Not to mention the freedom, flexibility, and full ownership of your data that you get with Baserow over Airtable.
Top features, pros, and cons
- Modern, clean interface.
- Good collaboration features.
- Customize how you view and organize data.
- Helpful resources to learn the differences between spreadsheets and relational databases.
- Huge community template marketplace.
- Free plan is very limiting.
- Becomes quite expensive for growing teams and large datasets.
- Running mathematical equations can be complex.
- Low record, storage, and collaborator limits.
6. Jotform Tables
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Jotform Tables is a solid alternative for when Google Sheets just isn’t enough for your team. This spreadsheet-database hybrid lets you collect and organize online data, collaborate with your teams, and manage your workflow within a single platform.
Tables are easy to edit and share, letting you easily set up formulas, filters, and color-coded labels to keep your data organized. In addition to searching, organizing, and sharing your data, the software offers plenty of view types, integrations, free templates, and ready-made formulas and column types.
It also comes with a built-in online form builder, making it possible to do things like collect online payments, contact details, survey data, and more, then get responses automatically synced to your Jotform Tables ready for you and your team to use.
Jotform Tables is available on every Jotform plan. The free Starter plan comes with 5 forms, 100 monthly submissions, and 100MB of available space. Paid plans start at $39 per month and up to $129 per month, with 1 user per team.
Features, pros, and cons
- Create online forms for data collection.
- Easily import data or add it manually.
- Organize data with ready-made column types.
- Sync responses from connected forms.
- A wide range of templates.
- Visualize data in different formats.
- Customer service isn’t highly-rated.
- Some users report duplicate entries on forms.
- Very low storage limits.
- Relatively expensive.
- Only 1 user per team.
7. Clickup
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Even though ClickUp is more of a project management system, you can replace your spreadsheet needs with ClickUp. It lets you manage your work all in one place, with great features for tasks, docs, chat, goals, and more.
While Google Sheets is a good way to edit and manage data, ClickUp has tons more functionality to help you plan projects, arrange tasks, and make complex calculations. As with other alternatives, ClickUp lets you switch between kanban, calendar, list, and other views. ClickUp stands out against other alternatives on this list for its unique set of other views, like Mind Map, Whiteboard, Embed, Team, and Workload.
Comments and chat make it easy to collaborate in real-time. It has lots of shortcuts to help you work more efficiently, as well as native automation to reduce repetitive tasks. ClickUp integrates easily with popular work software like Zoom, Slack, Zapier, and more.
Some reported downsides include severe and repetitive performance issues and a less-than-friendly native mobile app.
Features, pros, and cons
- See tasks and details clearly on a grid.
- Make simple and complex calculations.
- Lots of unique views for visualizing data.
- Comments and chat view make for easy collaboration.
- Shortcuts, reminders, and automation improve efficiency.
- Fairly robust native integration options.
- The interface can be overwhelming and takes some getting used to.
- The hierarchy and views can be chaotic.
- Takes quite a bit of work to optimize for different processes.
- It can be very slow, very buggy.
- Desktop version has fewer features than its web app counterpart.
- No offline mode renders it useless without an internet connection.
8. LibreOffice
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This free, open-source office suite works on Linux, Windows, and Mac operating systems. It requires no internet to use and is a good alternative to Google Sheets and paid office suites. From its clean interface, you can access an array of word processing, presentation, and spreadsheet tools.
It also has the ability to open and save documents in many other formats. By default, LibreOffice Calc puts open, standardized formats at the forefront, rather than its proprietary counterparts.
Ideal for individuals and small businesses who want a free and open-source collaboration suite, LibreOffice is continually updated with new improvements. It doesn’t offer real-time communication or collaboration functionality, nor does it offer cloud storage.
However, LibreOffice works offline, and you’ll find all of the functionality (and sometimes more) that you’d come to expect from more traditional spreadsheet tools like Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets.
Top features, pros, and cons
- Completely free and open source.
- Very actively developed and receives frequent updates.
- In some cases, has more functionality than Google Sheets and even Microsoft Excel.
- Part of the bundled LibreOffice suite of tools.
- Spreadsheets look similar to Google Sheets.
- Cross-platform (macOS, Windows, Linux).
- A good desktop solution.
- Could do with collaboration features.
- UI could use a refresh.
Make Baserow your Google Sheets alternative
Baserow offers much more than just spreadsheets. Our open-source, no-code platform can be optionally installed on your own server, meaning there’s no vendor lock-in. Plus it is API-first, so you can easily integrate it with any software you need.
It’s the best alternative to Google Sheets if you’re looking for a spreadsheet-database hybrid that’s comparable to the likes of Airtable and other big online database providers. Take a look at our pricing. Or get started with our free trial today!
