> Niching down, if you work in operations at a <50 person startup or SMB and your company relies on a Postgres or MySQL database, Sourcetable is an affordable reporting tool with turnkey data infrastructure that doesn’t require code or engineers to set up.
I'm already using Retool for these kinds of tasks- what does sourcetable do that I can't already do with Retool?
edit: also, did you build your own spreadsheet engine, or use an off-the-shelf one? (also will it be open source ;P)
Category Comparison (table-based solutions): "How are you different than Retool/Airtable/Coda/Notion/Zapier Tables, etc."
The primary difference vs table-based solutions is that Sourcetable is a spreadsheet in the common sense of the word, similar to Excel and Sheets. We have A1 notation and cell-based referencing. This is what most users expect, and this flexibility/familiarity has a big impact on the breadth of users and use cases within a team.
The formula referencing system of these table-based solutions is usually very limited both to columns/rows (not cells), and is a set of SQL-based queries which are much more limited than that 500+ formulas and functions spreadsheet users commonly expect.
Retool specifically: I tend to think of Retool as a lightweight custom-ERP software system, whereas Sourcetable more like Excel + PowerBI + Data Warehouse, so we will generally be much stronger for reporting and analysis. We definitely have some overlap in potential users since technical operators should like us both. FWIW - Retool is an excellent product.
We use a heavily modified licensed engine that prevents us from open sourcing everything (for now). We have plans to open source our agentic/plugin framework, and other parts of the system. We also have a strong ethos of contributing back to open source where we can (contributed back to Arrow, DuckDB etc.).
I'd also add that while everyone knows how to use and work with spreadsheets, we also provide a SQL layer on top that you can use to query data sources as an advanced user (we developed a nomenclature to work within sheets/across sheets/files/our data-warehouse). This allows more technical users to work side-by-side in the same environment as non-technical users without crossing pythonic or reporting boundaries.
On top of this, the AI assistant can answer most of the questions you might have of all this data.
I think as ML gets more sophisticated, we will in general need to be less technical. The "tooling" might even disappear, but we will still need something to communicate important data centric decisions. Whether you like it or not spreadsheets are the foundation of human research and operations and have been for thousands of years, and I feel humanity will need less complicated "tools" and we will keep to our roots.
I'm already using Retool for these kinds of tasks- what does sourcetable do that I can't already do with Retool?
edit: also, did you build your own spreadsheet engine, or use an off-the-shelf one? (also will it be open source ;P)