Baserow vs. NocoDB: two open source Airtable alternatives

When it comes to no-code databases, there are a handful of options that you can use for your business. Although both Baserow and NocoDB are Airtable alternatives, there are notable differences that can make a difference in how you use them and how they’re incorporated into your tech stack. In this article, we’ll explore similarities and differences across a number of variables so that you can determine which is better suited for you.

Feature comparison

This table highlights the biggest differences. Overlapping features (such as public view sharing, grid view, REST API, importing, exporting, and many more) are therefore excluded.

Feature	Baserow	NocoDB
Templates (higher is better)	50+	No
Importing 5.7k rows / 14 fields (lower is better)	7 seconds	19 seconds
API token permissions	Yes	No
Real time collaboration	Yes	No
Direct filter and sort matching	Yes	No
Trash bin	Yes	No
Aggregations	Yes	No
Row coloring	Yes	No
Snapshots	Yes	No
Duplication	Yes	No
Ordering of rows and fields	Yes	No
Undo-redo	Yes	No
Form conditions	Yes	No
Supports plugins	Yes	No
Paste in multiple cells	Yes	No
Search entire table	Yes	No
Rich file previews like video, audio and documents	Yes	No
Hosted available	Yes	No
GraphQL API	No	Yes
Connecting to an existing PostgreSQL, MySQL or SQLite database	No	Yes
Conditional webhooks	No	Yes
Filter groups	No	Yes
Commenter and viewer permissions	No	Yes
First commit	Feb 15, 2019	Oct 29, 2017

Created October 15, 2022

Collaboration

An important part of a no-code database is collaboration with your team members. Baserow offers real time collaboration, meaning you see changes that are being made by your co-workers in real time. With NocoDB you have to refresh the page in order to see the changes. This can result in data conflicts.

Accidental changes

Have you ever accidentally deleted something or made a change that resulted in data loss? This is a common scenario in productivity tools. Baserow has a trash bin and undo-redo functionality. When you delete something, it’s moved to the trash bin before being permanently deleted. This allows you to restore deleted items. Clicking the undo button reverts the last action you have done. NocoDB doesn’t have trash or undo-redo functionalities, which means your data could be permanently lost when you make a mistake or deleting something.

Templates

There are limitless use cases for no-code databases, and templates play a critical part in multiple ways. First of all, templates provide a starting point. Whether it’s a personal or professional use case, templates provide a jump-off point that establishes the database structure you need. Secondly, templates provide inspiration. This inspiration is helpful in not only using — but expanding — the functionality of the templates.

Baserow offers more than 50 templates as of this writing, and this number has increased every month for the past 18 months. Baserow’s templates can be used in both the hosted and self-hosted version. NocoDB doesn’t have templates, which makes it more difficult to use for less experienced no-code developers.

Hosting

Because both solutions are open source, they can be hosted on your own server. For many companies and individuals, it’s important to own and manage their own data. This is especially true in cases where the platform’s servers are hosted in countries with lackadaisical privacy laws.

While both Baserow and NocoDB can be deployed on a server using multiple methods, Baserow provides a hosted SaaS version in addition to the self-hosted version. This hosted SaaS version of Baserow is 100% free to try and requires zero technical knowledge to start using. A big benefit is that they know how to run their product at scale, which is useful if you plan to use it at scale in your organization because you know it will perform well.

Popularity

The popularity of open source projects is often measured in the amount of stars on the repository. Since Baserow is hosted on GitLab, and NocoDB is hosted on GitHub, it’s more difficult to make that comparison because they’re not on the same platform. Therefore, the comparison must be made using different metrics.

The philosophy at Baserow is that open source projects should be hosted on an open source platform. According to their founder on Reddit, that’s the main reason why they’re on GitLab. Baserow is the the 9th highest ranking project in terms of stars and has almost 61 sponsors who are paying on a monthly basis.

NocoDB, like most open source projects, is on GitHub, with around 30k stars. I was unable to find out where that ranks exactly. The repository with the highest amount of stars on GitHub at almost 350k. They have 12 sponsors at the time of this writing.

User experience

A great user experience is becoming more and more important, not only for SaaS tools, but for open source software as well. Baserow focuses on making everything as smooth as possible. You see nice loading states, clear error messages, a clean design, spreadsheet-like experience, and in many other details as well.

NocoDB can feel a unresponsive in certain scenarios. The interface is powerful, but it looks a bit crowded. Seeing raw SQL errors from time to time also makes it less attractive to non-technical users.

Performance

Performance is extremely important if you want to scale your business and no-code database. Therefore, both tools have been put to the test. During the test I imported a CSV file and measured how long certain operations would take on that table. I found a 1.2MB CSV public data set (https://www.stats.govt.nz/assets/Uploads/Business-financial-data/Business-financial-data-March-2022-quarter/Download-data/business-financial-data-mar-2022-quarter-csv.zip) containing 5715 rows and 14 fields that I imported. Both tools have similar performance, though importing the data set in Baserow is more than two times faster.

Operation	Baserow	NocoDB
Importing data set	7 seconds	19 seconds
Exporting to CSV	2 seconds	2 seconds
Create 100 rows	423 milliseconds	430 milliseconds
Search for “1610”	118 milliseconds	150 milliseconds

I ran the tests on a Digital Ocean droplet that has 4GB of RAM and 2 CPU cores. Both Baserow and NocoDB were installed using Cloudron.

Database technology

One of the biggest unique selling propositions (USPs) of NocoDB is that it can connect to an existing database. This is useful if you have a software development background, because you can connect it to a database that already has a schema and then it functions as a GUI. It’s compatible with many known relational database engines like PostgreSQL, MySQL and SQLite. Be careful not to break your existing schema.

Baserow is a turn key solution that uses PostgreSQL under the hood. It’s not possible to connect to an existing database, so you need to use the import functionality to move your data into the platform. This means it’s accessible to users with and without a development background. Baserow leverages the full power of PostgreSQL, widely considered the most powerful relational database engine, without having to worry about compatibility.

Business model

Baserow follows the open core business model. This means that most features are freely available, and you pay for additional features that matter for larger teams like role based access, SSO, direct support, and specific views.

NocoDB does not have a paid business model so far. Free open source projects need a business model to survive, which is why it’s presumed that a paid version is on the horizon.

License

Baserow Open Source is licensed under the most permissive software license there is, the MIT license. This means that you can use the code for commercial purposes. They also offer a premium plugin with additional features under a proprietary license.

NocoDB is licensed under the AGPLv3 license, a copyleft license. This means you can use the code commercially, but if you distribute changes in a any public way, you must release these updates in the code under the AGPL license. This makes using NocoDB impossible for many large organizations who want to modify or extend their database tool with propriety features.

Support

Like many open source projects, NocoDB offers community support. This works well for experienced teams who are able to support themselves without need of a vendor support SLA.

Baserow announced its Enterprise version, which includes direct priority support starting November 1st 2022. Most companies using open source technology require a support contract with the open source vendor.

Conclusion

If you want want a user-friendly tool with advanced features and collaboration with multiple users, then I recommend Baserow. The interface is intuitive, the user experience is smooth, and it’s performant with large volumes of data. The similarities with Airtable are clear, and it’s a turn key solution that works as expected the first time you jump into it.

If you’re a technical individual with the requirement of connecting to an existing database schema, I recommend using NocoDB. It’s like a graphical database editor with Airtable-like features. You’ll frequently see raw SQL queries, especially when something goes wrong, so you’ll need to understand that in order to be proficient in working with NocoDB.

Originally written Oct 18, 2022 on: https://medium.com/@paul-hicks/baserow-vs-nocodb-two-open-source-airtable-alternatives-67602e66bd91