I run into a need for this type of software frequently but I don’t know what it’s called or if it exists. I am very adept at Google Sheets and it works great for pulling in data from other places, creating custom little dashboards and forms, etc but where it’s not particularly good is storing relational data for example “This book is written by author” and then having “author” be some other entity with its own attributes.
Now of course, there’s SQL but using SQL requires learning SQL syntax which is much more complex. Plus, you have to define a schema and changing schema after you’ve made the db can be complicated. Not to mention if you use SQL, now you need some kind of front-end to the SQL to make it more friendly to a user even if they would be fine at their skill level managing google sheets.
There are many great CRMs, CMSes, and other systems (I have used Drupal in the past for this niche), but they are often much more difficult to customize than Google Sheets and focused more on data storage/retrieval and less on using that data to calculate things, make graphs etc.
I know AirTable exists, it seems closer to what I want to use, but of course it is not OSS. What other “middle ground” or ‘more powerful sheets’ tools are out there, and are any OSS?
I’ve never tried it myself but Grist looks like it could fit your needs.
how bout baserow.io or nocodb cloud? Haven’t used them but I think they’re open source. But they don’t have mobile apps AFAIK for editing.
Nocodb can run locally as it is distributed as a binary (among other formats).
If you search for open source airtable alternative you will find stuff like https://github.com/nocodb/nocodb
I have never used these though so good luck.
I use grafana for data visualization. Its pretty easy to use imo. You can also use it as part of a tig stack for system monitoring (telegraf, influxdb, grafana). Afaik you can just tell grafana what fields to use in a database and display the data. What doesn’t work is changing zhe data I think. Good luck and lmk if you need more info.
I would definitely say that NocoDB is the closest OSS to Airtable, but it’s still pretty buggy and they make a lot of changes and sometimes very large changes. They’ve overhauled the UI twice in the last year. It also lacks one-to-one relationships for now. But it’s still usable.
Look at Https://www.openrefine.org/
