I got tired of juggling 5 database GUIs, so I built one for all of them

#database #vectordatabase #postgres #redis

A look at my desktop last year:

TablePlus open for Postgres
RedisInsight running in the background
Kibana in a browser tab for Elasticsearch
DBeaver because TablePlus didn't handle that one ClickHouse cluster well
The SQLite Browser app for local stuff
And a terminal because half the time the GUI didn't do what I needed anyway

Five GUIs. Different keyboard shortcuts. Different connection managers. Different mental models for "browse a table." Different update cadences (some of these tools haven't shipped a release in years).

It wasn't a productivity problem at first. I just got used to it. But the more databases the modern stack pulls in — Postgres for the app, Redis for cache, Elasticsearch for search, ClickHouse for analytics, Qdrant for vectors — the more obvious it became that nobody had built one tool that just worked across all of them.

So I built one. It's called 1bench.

Why nothing existed

When you look at the database GUI landscape, you see two kinds of tools:

Single-database tools — RedisInsight, pgAdmin, MongoDB Compass. Built by the database company, deeply integrated, but obviously only for that one database.
Universal SQL tools — DBeaver, TablePlus, Beekeeper Studio. Great for SQL databases, but they treat NoSQL/search/vector/graph engines as second-class citizens (or skip them entirely).

Nothing covered the actual stack a working developer uses today. So I'd end up with one app per data store, or I'd settle for a SQL tool that technically connected to Redis but felt like it was added as an afterthought.

I tried building a workflow around DBeaver. I tried using just terminals. I tried writing my own scripts. Nothing stuck.

What I actually wanted

The bar was simple:

One app, every database I use, with consistent UX
Connections stored locally, no cloud account required
Read/write that doesn't force me to juggle 5 different query syntaxes
Cross-platform — macOS, Windows, Linux

That's it. Nothing fancy.

What 1bench is

A desktop app that connects to ClickHouse, SQLite, Qdrant, Postgres, Redis, Elasticsearch, and all their variants (CockroachDB, YugabyteDB, Valkey, KeyDB, Dragonfly, DiceDB, OpenSearch, etc.) — all from one interface. More are being added every week (MongoDB, DuckDB, Meilisearch, Neo4j, etc.).

Same connection manager. Same tabbed UI. Same query history. Same export to CSV/JSON. Just different data sources behind the scenes.

If you're working in a SQL database, you get a SQL editor with autocomplete and explain plans. If you're in Redis, you get a key browser with type-aware viewers (lists, hashes, sorted sets). If you're in Qdrant, you get vector search and collection inspection. The UI adapts to what the underlying database actually is, instead of pretending everything is a SQL table.

And because every database is in the same app, you also get database insights — memory, ops/sec, replication, topology — next to your data. Most GUIs skip this entirely.

What changed for me

The biggest thing isn't speed (though context-switching between apps does add up). It's that I stopped avoiding certain databases because the tooling friction was too high.

I used to dread digging into our Elasticsearch cluster because Kibana was overkill for what I needed and curl-ing JSON queries got old fast. Now I just open 1bench, connect, browse the indices, run a query, done.

Same for Qdrant — I'd been using the Qdrant cloud dashboard or curl, and both were friction enough that I'd put off debugging vector queries. Now it's a tab.