Originally published at devtoolpicks.com
Airtable's per-seat pricing is the reason most indie hackers end up here in the first place. If you've already read our take on Airtable alternatives, you know the honest conclusion: sometimes what you actually need is Postgres and an admin panel, not another spreadsheet UI with a subscription attached. Baserow, NocoDB, and Teable are the three real contenders if you still want the spreadsheet-style interface, just without paying Airtable's per-seat tax or accepting its vendor lock-in.
All three are open source. All three can be self-hosted for free. Where they actually differ is what stays free once you self-host, how their cloud pricing scales with team size, and what each one is betting its future on. One is the most mature open-source option with the deepest integration library. One is built to sit on top of a database you already run instead of owning its own store. One is betting everything on AI-native features. None of them is a straight upgrade over the other two, so the right pick depends entirely on which of those three bets matches what you're actually building. Here's what the numbers say.
Quick Verdict
| Tool | Best For | Price | Rating |
|---|---|---|---|
| Baserow | Most mature self-hosted feature set | Free self-hosted core, $10/user/mo cloud Premium | 4/5 |
| NocoDB | Connecting to a database you already have | Free self-hosted Community (unlimited), $12/seat/mo cloud Plus | 4.5/5 |
| Teable | AI-native features, generous cloud row limits | $10/seat/mo cloud Pro, self-hosted AI needs a license | 3.5/5 |
Baserow
Baserow is the most established of the three, built on Django and Postgres, with an Application Builder on top that lets you go beyond a spreadsheet grid into actual internal apps. It's the closest thing to a drop-in Airtable replacement in terms of feature maturity, and it has the deepest bench of integrations (n8n, Zapier, Make all have native connectors).
Confirmed from Baserow's own pricing page: the cloud Free plan gives you 3,000 rows and 2GB of storage per workspace. Premium is $10 per user per month billed yearly ($12 billed monthly), raising that to 50,000 rows and 20GB, and adding AI features and all view types. Advanced is $18 per user per month billed yearly ($22 monthly), with 250,000 rows and 100GB. Self-hosted, the core product is unlimited on rows and storage at every tier, including free. What you're actually paying for when you buy a self-hosted Premium or Advanced license is role-based permissions, audit logs, SSO, and AI features, not usage headroom.
The catch is that "free self-hosted" only gets you the base feature set. If your team needs audit logs or SSO, which plenty of small teams eventually do for basic compliance reasons, you're paying the same per-user price whether you're on the cloud or running it on your own Hetzner box.
Baserow's Application Builder is worth calling out specifically, since it's the one feature here that goes beyond "spreadsheet with a nicer UI." It lets you build an actual internal app, a form-driven client portal, an approval workflow, a simple CRUD tool, on top of your Baserow data without writing frontend code. Neither NocoDB nor Teable has a direct equivalent, though NocoDB's newer Interfaces feature is aiming at similar territory.
Who should skip it: if you specifically want a tool that connects to a database you already run, Baserow isn't it, it wants to own the data store. Skip it too if your workspace's row count sits right around the 50,000 mark on cloud, since Baserow's Premium tier caps there while Teable's equivalent tier goes to 250,000 for the same per-seat price.
NocoDB
NocoDB's real differentiator is structural: it can sit on top of a database you already have, MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, or SQLite, and turn it into a spreadsheet-style interface. Baserow and Teable both insist on owning their own internal Postgres store. If your data already lives somewhere, NocoDB is the only one of the three built to meet it there.
Confirmed from NocoDB's own pricing page: cloud Free gives 1,000 records, 1GB storage, and 3 editor seats (commenters are unlimited and always free). Plus is $12 per seat per month billed annually ($15 monthly), covering 50,000 records and 20GB, with a genuinely useful mechanic: you pay for the first 9 editors and every editor after that is free, so a 20-person team pays the same as a 9-person team. Business is $24 per seat per month billed annually ($30 monthly), covering 300,000 records and 100GB, with the same pay-for-9 cap. Self-hosted, the Community edition is fair-code licensed and free forever, with unlimited records, storage, and seats, and all five user roles included at no cost. Paid self-hosted tiers only unlock SSO, workflows, table and field-level permissions, and AI features.
The pay-for-9 model is the standout here, and it's the most generous free self-hosted tier of the three since it includes unlimited seats out of the box. The tradeoff is that below 9 users, you're paying full per-seat price with no discount, so a 3-person team gets no benefit from the mechanic that makes NocoDB attractive at scale.
Feature-wise, NocoDB ships six view types (Grid, Kanban, Gallery, Form, Calendar, Map) free on every plan including self-hosted Community, which is more than either competitor gives away for nothing. The Map view specifically has no equivalent in Baserow or Teable, and it's a real plus if any of your records have a location field.
Who should skip it: if your team is small and staying small, the pay-for-9 pricing structure doesn't help you, and Teable's flat per-seat pricing on Pro ends up cheaper at low headcounts. Skip it too if you don't actually need to connect to an existing database, since that's the whole reason NocoDB's architecture looks the way it does.
Teable
Teable is the newest of the three and it's built AI-native from the start: AI chat, AI-generated fields, an app builder, and an AI agent it calls CuppyClaw, none of which have a real equivalent in Baserow or NocoDB. Underneath, it's also Postgres-native, similar to Baserow, and it holds ISO 9001 and ISO 27001 certifications, which some agencies and regulated-industry teams will care about.
Confirmed from Teable's own pricing page: cloud Free gives 1,000 rows, 1GB of attachments, and 200 AI credits. Pro is $10 per seat per month billed yearly ($12 monthly), jumping to 250,000 rows, 10GB, and 1,000 AI credits per seat. Business is $20 per seat per month billed yearly ($24 monthly), covering 1,000,000 rows, 100GB, and adding SSO and an authority matrix for granular permissions. Self-hosted, Teable's own billing documentation confirms the free Community edition is unlimited on rows and storage under its AGPL-3.0 license, but AI features and enterprise capabilities require a paid, pre-paid seat license with no usage caps.
That self-hosted licensing is worth being upfront about. Teable's own community forum has an open thread from users who deployed it expecting a flat per-instance price and found the terms had shifted to per-seat licensing instead, which caused real frustration for teams that had already rolled it out. The core product itself is solid, but if you're planning to self-host and want the AI features, verify the current license terms directly with Teable before you commit, since this has genuinely moved under users before.
The AI credits system is also worth understanding before you pick a plan. Every tier includes a base credit allocation (200 on Free, 1,000 per seat on Pro, 2,000 per seat on Business), and Teable bills additional credit packs at cost with no markup once you burn through them. For teams that plan to lean on AI chat or AI field generation heavily, that's a fairer model than a hard cutoff, but it does mean your actual monthly cost can run higher than the base per-seat price suggests.
Who should skip it: if AI features aren't the draw and you just want the cheapest possible self-hosted spreadsheet database, NocoDB's Community edition gets you further for less friction. Skip Teable too if licensing stability matters more to you than being on the newest tool, given the self-hosted pricing history above.
How Do These Actually Compare on Cost?
Run the numbers on a specific scenario and the differences get concrete. Take a 3-person team on cloud hosting that needs 60,000 records, just over the 50,000-record ceiling on both Baserow's Premium and NocoDB's Plus tiers. Baserow needs its Advanced tier to cover that, at $18 per seat: $54 a month. NocoDB needs Business at $24 per seat: $72 a month. Teable's Pro tier covers up to 250,000 rows at $10 per seat, so the same team pays $30 a month, the cheapest of the three purely because of where its row ceiling happens to sit.
Self-hosting flips the story entirely. All three are free at the core tier with no row or storage caps once you're running your own server, so the real cost becomes a small VPS, roughly $5 to $6 a month for something like a Hetzner CX22. If you already went through this same math for Turso vs Neon vs Supabase, the pattern is familiar: self-hosting wins on raw cost, cloud wins on not having to think about backups, uptime, or upgrades yourself.
That last part matters more than the dollar figure suggests. Self-hosting any of these three means you own the Docker container, the database backups, the SSL certificate renewal, and the upgrade path when a new version ships. None of that is hard, but it's ongoing, and it's the actual price of the free tier. Budget an hour or two a month for maintenance once you're relying on it for real work, not just a side project database nobody depends on yet.
Which One Should You Actually Use?
If you're self-hosting and want the least friction and the lowest lifetime cost, NocoDB's Community edition is the strongest pick, unlimited seats and records for free, forever, with no license needed until you want SSO or workflows. If your data already lives in a real database and you just want a UI on top of it, NocoDB is also the only one of the three built for that job. Pick Baserow if you want the most mature self-hosted feature set and the deepest integration library, and you're comfortable paying for a license once you need audit logs or SSO. Pick Teable if AI-native features are genuinely useful to your workflow and you're staying on the cloud plan, since its row limits are the most generous per dollar there. If you're considering self-hosting Teable specifically for the AI features, confirm the current license terms first. If you're comparing this whole category against just using Notion instead, remember that none of these three are trying to be a docs tool, they're trying to be a database with a friendly face, and that's a different job.
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