Open-source alternatives to Airtable

A useful exercise: I took a real Airtable base of mine (1,400 rows across 8 linked tables, a couple of formula fields, two views per table) and imported it into NocoDB, Baserow, and Teable, the same week, against the same Postgres. Six weeks later, here is what I would not have known from reading the GitHub READMEs.

The one project I did not rebuild for this exercise is Directus. Directus is in the list above and is excellent in its own right, but it is honestly not in the same product category as Airtable — Directus is a “headless CMS over your database” with a spreadsheet-shaped admin, whereas the others are “Airtable-shaped products that happen to use a database”. If your team’s mental model is “spreadsheet first, database second”, Directus will feel weirdly inverted on day one and you will spend more time explaining the model than using the tool.

NocoDB — the spreadsheet that grew up the most

NocoDB is the one I keep coming back to for production. 63k stars, the biggest community in this list, but more importantly: when I broke its auto-generated schema by hand-altering a Postgres column, NocoDB recovered gracefully on the next reload. That is a small thing that matters every day. Two things to know before you commit:

1. The license is “NOASSERTION” on GitHub but is actually AGPL-3.0 in the repo itself. The AGPL trigger is the same as the one for ZITADEL and Grafana: if you embed NocoDB into a SaaS your customers pay for, get legal advice on the boundary. If you are running it as your team’s internal database, AGPL is a non-issue.
2. NocoDB owns the schema. It will write its nc_* metadata tables into the database you point it at. If you are sharing that Postgres with other apps, give NocoDB its own schema or its own database — do not point it at a database with public.users you care about.

Baserow — the most Airtable-shaped UX, with a price

Baserow’s UI is the closest pixel-for-pixel match to Airtable in this list. If you are migrating non-technical users who know Airtable, the training cost is the lowest here. The 4.8k star count under-represents how polished it is — Baserow’s growth has been steadier and quieter than the TypeScript-heavy alternatives. The trade-off shows up in extensibility: the formula language is Baserow’s own (not Airtable’s), so most non-trivial formulas will need a hand-rewrite during migration. Budget half a day per hundred unique formulas in your source base. Python backend, which is easier to read and patch than the TypeScript projects if you need to fork.

Teable — the database-first bet

Teable’s pitch (“No-Code Postgres”) is literally what it is — Teable does not own the schema. You can point Teable at an existing Postgres and it will read the real tables, and external tools (a Metabase dashboard, a custom job) can write to the same tables without going through Teable. This is structurally different from NocoDB and Baserow, both of which want to be the source of truth. If your scenario is “I already have a database, I just want a spreadsheet view on top”, Teable is the only project on this list that fits cleanly. The cost: it is the youngest of the three (21k stars but a younger codebase), and some of the Airtable features Baserow has shipped (rich text, kanban polish) are not fully there yet.

The migration step everyone underestimates

All three of these projects import Airtable CSVs cleanly for the data. None of them import Airtable automations or interfaces — those have to be rebuilt from scratch. If your Airtable base has 20 automations firing Slack messages on row changes, factor in three engineer-days per project to wire them back up. NocoDB has the most mature webhooks story, Baserow’s automations UI is the most spreadsheet-user-friendly, Teable expects you to do automations outside the product (Postgres triggers, n8n, your own service).

What I actually run

For my own team’s content calendar (the original Airtable use case): Baserow, because the UX is closest and nobody on the team had to relearn the tool. For an internal app where engineers also wanted to query the data with raw SQL: Teable. NocoDB is the one I would deploy if a non-technical team needed an Airtable replacement and was willing to spend an hour learning the UI differences.