Grist acts as the ideal compromise between heavy-duty relational databases and classic Excel spreadsheets. For those used to working in Excel, the learning curve is minimal, and you can get up to speed very quickly. Additionally, Grist has become a great alternative for me, sitting right between Obsidian and Notion. It takes the best of both worlds: offering powerful table relationships (like Notion) and supporting flexible custom widgets (like Obsidian), all while remaining an open and non-proprietary solution.
1. Open-source & Self-hosting: Complete independence, control over your own data, and active community support.
2. Python under the hood: All logic, formulas, and relationships run on Python, making the system incredibly flexible.
3. Custom widgets: Excellent interface customization. For instance, you can use widgets to set up convenient previews for attached files (like images or documents).
4. Smart attachment handling: Unlike Excel, attaching files directly to columns here is very convenient. To prevent the database file itself from bloating and taking too long to load, Grist features a brilliant option to offload attachments to external storage (S3). Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Despite the powerful concept, some features still feel a bit "raw":
External storage (S3) limitations: The excellent S3 connection feature mentioned above is only available in the Enterprise version and is proprietary, which slightly contradicts the overall open-source philosophy of the product.
Unpolished Action Button: Excel had this great feature where you could insert a button anywhere and bind a VBA macro to it for execution. Grist has a separate "Action Button" custom widget, but it still works quite strangely and clumsily. I really hope they fix this soon.
No cascade delete for rows: If you delete a row in a "parent" table, the co-dependent data in the "child" tables just hangs there as dead weight. There is no automatic cleanup.
Missing basic Excel shortcuts: It severely lacks the familiar drag-to-fill functionality down a column (for example, auto-filling dates or logical numerical sequences like 1, 2, 3...). Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.