Quick start guide: Get started with Baserow

This guide maps out your journey from Baserow beginner to power user. Learn the core concepts behind workspaces, databases, applications, dashboards, and automations, then dive into hands-on creation with links to detailed documentation for each step.

Your Baserow learning journey

Baserow gives you four powerful builders that work together inside workspaces: Database Builder for organizing data, Application Builder for creating custom apps, Dashboard Builder for visualizing metrics, and Automation Builder for streamlining workflows.

Your first step is understanding how these pieces fit together. This guide shows you the optimal path to learn each one, with practical milestones along the way.

Understanding the Baserow workspace

Everything in Baserow lives inside a workspace, your collaborative environment where teams organize projects, databases, applications, dashboards, and automations.

Inside each workspace, you can create and manage four types of builders that form the foundation of Baserow:

  • Database Builder: Structure and organize your data with tables, fields, and relationships. Databases provide the data foundation.
  • Application Builder: Design custom web applications without writing code. Applications present that data to users.
  • Dashboard Builder: Create visual analytics and monitoring dashboards. Dashboards visualize performance metrics.
  • Automation Builder: Build workflows that connect data, trigger actions, and integrate with external tools. Automations keep everything running smoothly in the background.

Step 1: Your account and first workspace

Before building anything, you need access to Baserow. You can choose Baserow Cloud for instant access with zero setup, or install a self-hosted version for complete control over your infrastructure.

Cloud is recommended for quick starts, while self-hosting works best for organizations with specific security or compliance requirements.

Once you’re logged in, you’ll land on the Baserow dashboard, your home base for accessing everything you create.

The first time you log in, Baserow may create a default workspace for you, or you can set up a new workspace from scratch. This is where you’ll organize all your databases, applications, dashboards, and automations.

Learn how to create and customize workspaces →

Step 2: Build your data foundation with databases

The Database Builder is where most Baserow users start their journey. Here’s why: every application, dashboard, and automation needs data to work with. Your database structure determines what’s possible in the other builders.

A database contains multiple tables, each representing a different type of information. Within each table, you define fields (columns) that specify what information you’re tracking: text, numbers, dates, formulas, and more.

The real power emerges when you create relationships between tables using link to table fields, building a relational structure that mirrors how your business actually works.

Baserow also offers multiple ways to visualize the same underlying data through views. The same table can appear as a spreadsheet-like grid for data entry, a kanban board for project management, a calendar for scheduling, a gallery for visual content, or a form for collecting information from others.

Start here:

Baserow database features

Step 3: Import existing data

You don’t need to start from scratch. Baserow makes it easy to bring existing data into your workspace from spreadsheets, other databases, or popular tools. Import CSV files, Excel spreadsheets, or JSON data to create new tables or add rows to existing ones. If you’re migrating from Airtable, Baserow offers a specialized import tool that preserves your table structure, field types, and relationships.

This means you can begin using Baserow immediately with your current data, then gradually build applications, dashboards, and automations on top of that foundation.

Step 4: Create custom applications

Once you have data structured in databases, the Application Builder lets you turn that data into custom software, such as customer portals, internal admin tools, public-facing websites or specialized tools unique to your business.

The Application Builder uses a drag-and-drop interface where you add elements to pages - tables, forms, buttons, images, text, and interactive components. Each element connects to your database data through a flexible system of data sources and integrations.

What makes this powerful is that you’re building real applications, not just viewing data. You can publish these applications with custom domains, making them accessible to anyone you choose, team members, customers, or the public.

Continue with:

Application Builder core concepts

Step 5: Visualize data with dashboards

The Dashboard Builder focuses specifically on analytics and monitoring. Dashboards present key metrics, trends, and insights at a glance.

Dashboards excel at giving teams shared visibility into performance. Each dashboard draws live data from your databases, automatically updating as your underlying data changes.

Explore dashboards:

Step 6: Automate workflows

The Automation Builder brings everything together by creating workflows that respond to events and connect different systems.

Automations work with triggers (what starts the workflow), filters (conditions that must be met), and actions (what happens).

This is where Baserow becomes more than a database or application platform, it becomes a central hub that orchestrates your business processes. Combined with webhooks and the Baserow API, automations can integrate with thousands of external services.

Automate your workflows:

Step 7: Collaborate with your team

Baserow shines brightest when teams work together. Invite collaborators to your workspace and assign roles that control what they can access and modify.

Role-based permissions become more sophisticated with paid plans, allowing you to set different access levels at the workspace, database, or even individual table level. This means you can share specific parts of your workspace with external clients, give contractors access to relevant databases only, or ensure sensitive information remains visible to authorized team members.

You can also share individual views publicly without requiring recipients to have Baserow accounts. This is perfect for collecting form submissions from customers, sharing read-only reports with stakeholders, or publishing content for public consumption.

Collaboration resources:

Bringing it all together: A complete example

Here’s how these four builders work together in practice. Imagine you’re building a customer support system:

Database Builder: Create tables for Tickets, Customers, and Support Agents. Define fields for ticket status, priority, description, timestamps, and relationships linking tickets to customers and agents.

Application Builder: Build a customer portal where clients can submit new tickets through a form, view their open tickets in a table, and see ticket details on individual pages. Create an internal admin tool where support agents can view all tickets, update statuses, add comments, and reassign tickets.

Dashboard Builder: Design a support metrics dashboard showing ticket volume over time, average response times, tickets by priority, agent workload distribution, and customer satisfaction scores.

Automation Builder: Set up workflows that send email notifications when new tickets are created, alert agents when high-priority tickets arrive, automatically update ticket statuses based on certain conditions, and generate weekly reports summarizing support activity.

Each builder serves its purpose, but together they create a complete, integrated system that would typically require custom software development.

Frequently asked questions

What should I build first in Baserow?

Start with the Database Builder to structure your data foundation. Create a few tables with basic fields and relationships that represent real information you need to track. Once you have data organized, experiment with different views to see how the same information can be visualized differently. Then move to building applications or dashboards.

How do workspaces, databases, and applications relate to each other?

Workspaces contain everything, they’re the top-level organizational unit. Inside a workspace, you can create multiple databases (each with multiple tables), multiple applications (each with multiple pages), multiple dashboards (each with multiple widgets), and multiple automations (each with multiple workflows). All of these can reference and interact with data from any database in the same workspace.

Can I use Baserow without building applications?

Absolutely. Many users only need the Database Builder for organizing information, using different views to interact with their data. The Application Builder is optional, it’s there when you need custom interfaces for specific users or workflows, but the database alone is a complete, powerful tool.

Do I need to learn all four builders at once?

No. The Database Builder is fundamental to everything else. Once you’re comfortable creating tables, fields, and views, explore whichever builder solves your most pressing need: applications for custom tools, dashboards for metrics, or automations for efficiency. You can adopt each builder gradually as your needs grow.

What’s the difference between a view and an application?

Views are different ways to display and interact with a single table’s data within the database itself. Applications are standalone interfaces that can combine data from multiple tables, add custom layouts, implement specific business logic, and be shared with users who never see the underlying database structure.

How does Baserow compare to spreadsheets like Excel or Google Sheets?

Baserow looks similar to spreadsheets but works differently. Spreadsheets are files; Baserow is a relational database. This means you can create relationships between tables, enforce data types, build applications on top of your data, and collaborate with sophisticated permission controls.

What’s next on your journey

Choose your next step based on what you want to accomplish:

For data organization:

For building applications:

For analytics and monitoring:

For automation and integration:

For team collaboration:

Related content

Still need help? If you’re looking for something else, please feel free to make recommendations or ask us questions; we’re ready to assist you.