Open-source alternatives to Airtable

At a glance

Open-source alternatives to Airtable compared
Tool	Licence	Self-hosting difficulty	Who it suits	Strengths
Baserow	MIT	Moderate: one Docker container to start, with external PostgreSQL recommended for production	Teams that like Airtable and want the same way of working	Familiar grid, forms and gallery views, Airtable importer, API, automations, no row or storage limits when self-hosted
Grist	Apache-2.0	Moderate: one Docker container, but logins need planning, as your own SSO needs the full edition	Spreadsheet-minded teams who want real formulas and fine-grained access	Python formulas, row and column access rules, easy-to-back-up SQLite files, direct import from Airtable

Baserow: MIT. Open core: premium and enterprise features are under separate licences. Licence checked 31 October 2026.
Grist: Apache-2.0. This covers the Community edition (grist-core). The full edition is under a non-free licence. Licence checked 31 October 2026.

Airtable is one of those tools that creeps up on you. Someone builds a tracker, it works, the whole team starts using it, and then you hit a limit. Team is $20 a person a month on an annual plan (about £15), which caps you at 50,000 records per base. Business is $45 (about £34) with a 125,000 cap. Five editors on Team pay around $1,200 a year, or about £909. On Business it's around $2,700, or about £2,045.

To be fair, Airtable only charges for people who can edit, and read-only users are free. But for a growing team, the two open-source tools below remove those per-editor fees and the record caps.

Baserow

Baserow is the closest thing to Airtable you can run yourself. It looks and works the same way: tables, linked records, views and forms, sitting on a PostgreSQL database.

Familiar to use. Anyone who knows Airtable will find their feet quickly. The free edition has grid, form and gallery views.
No row or storage limits when self-hosted, according to Baserow's own FAQ.
An Airtable importer. Paste a share link and it brings over tables, records, links between tables, attachments and grid views.
API first. Everything is available through an API, which makes it a handy back end for other systems.
More than tables. It also includes automations, dashboards and an application builder.

The catch is the open-core model. The heart of Baserow is MIT licensed, but some features are paid. On the hosted version, kanban, calendar, timeline and survey views need Premium, and self-hosted Premium is priced the same way, at $10 a user a month on annual billing. Role-based permissions and audit logs need Advanced, at $18. If your team lives in the kanban or calendar view, check this before you commit, because you're back to per-user fees.

Running it is straightforward. One Docker image holds everything, but the docs strongly recommend an external PostgreSQL database for production.

Grist

Grist starts from the other end. It's less "Airtable clone" and more "a spreadsheet that went to university".

Python formulas. You get full Python plus many Excel functions, which is a big step up for anyone doing real calculations.
Serious access control. Rules can apply to individual rows, columns and tables, based on who the user is and what's in the cell. So a sales rep could see only their own customers.
Simple to back up. Each document is a SQLite file, which any SQLite tool can read.
Imports directly from Airtable.
Light for its size. The docs suggest 8 GB of memory, 2 CPUs and 20 GB of disk for moderate workloads, and small documents use far less.

Watch out for login. Grist's Community edition is free under Apache-2.0, but connecting directly to your own single sign-on (OIDC or SAML) needs the full edition and an activation key. So do the AI assistant and automations. Community can still use "Sign in with getgrist.com" or sit behind forward authentication, which takes a bit more setting up. Organisations with under $1 million in annual income can ask for a free activation key, which covers plenty of small UK firms. Everyone else pays $24 to $30 a user a month for the full self-hosted edition.

Neither needs a server if you'd rather not run one. Baserow's hosted Premium plan is $10 a user a month on annual billing, and Grist's hosted Pro plan is $8, though both of those bring back per-user fees and row limits.

Which one?

My pick is Baserow. It's the shortest step from Airtable, your team won't need retraining and the importer gets you most of the way. The main drawback is that kanban and calendar views cost extra per user, so check which views you really use.

You love Airtable and just want out of the limits: Baserow.
Lots of calculations, or people should only see their own rows: Grist.

What it costs

Airtable

Airtable Team: £15.15 per user a month, billed annually (converted from $20 at the European Central Bank reference rate on 2 October 2026). Checked 31 October 2026 (source).
Airtable Business: £34.09 per user a month, billed annually (converted from $45 at the European Central Bank reference rate on 2 October 2026). Checked 31 October 2026 (source).

Self-hosted, run for you

No per-user fees. Adding people doesn't add licence costs.
Setup: a one-off fee to set it up and move your data across.
Hosting and care: a fixed monthly fee covering every app on your server.
I'll quote once I know what you need.

Paid tool prices exclude VAT unless stated.

The UK angle

Airtable is fine for most small firms. A US-hosted tool isn't a problem in itself, as long as you know what's in there and your privacy notice covers it. I wouldn't switch for that reason alone.
Think about what's in the tables. If you hold customer lists it's normal stuff. If you've built an HR tracker with sickness notes in it, that's more sensitive, and keeping it on a server you control gives you a simple answer.
It's your data either way. With a self-hosted tool it sits in PostgreSQL or SQLite, and you can read it without anyone's permission.

Honest drawbacks

Airtable's formulas don't come across to Baserow. Formula, lookup and rollup fields aren't imported. Convert them first or rebuild them.
Nor do automations and interfaces. These need rebuilding, and row comments and revision history don't transfer either.
Fewer integrations. Airtable has a bigger marketplace of ready-made connections. Here you're more likely to use the API.
Interfaces are less polished in my view. Airtable's interface designer has had years of work.
Someone has to run it: updates, backups and looking after the database, and with big tables that's a real job.

If your tracker has grown into something the business depends on, the team at Dev Partners can turn it into a proper custom system or connect it to the rest of your software.