Most lists of Airtable alternatives rank tools by GitHub stars. Stars tell you a project is popular. They do not tell you whether you are allowed to use it the way you are planning to, and in this category that question got sharper in 2026.
This post is the same four tools everyone names, checked against a different column: the licence text sitting in each repository today. One of them is not what the lists say it is.
Why people leave
Airtable prices per seat. Team is $20 per user per month billed annually, Business is $45, and Enterprise Scale is quoted per organisation. The bill tracks headcount rather than usage, so the finance person who opens a base twice a month costs the same as the operations lead living in it, and every read-only stakeholder you invite is another line on the invoice.
That is a perfectly reasonable model until the number of people who need to look at the data grows faster than the number of people producing it. At that point a self-hosted base starts to look less like a hobby and more like arithmetic.
Check the licence before you check the stars
NocoDB is the most starred project in this category and the one most lists put first. On 8 January 2026 its repository replaced the GNU Affero General Public License with the Sustainable Use License, in a commit titled "chore: change to sustainable use license". The licence file was revised again on 29 January to spell out which branches it covers.
The Sustainable Use License is source-available rather than open source. Its central restriction reads: you may use or modify the software "only for your own internal business purposes or for non-commercial or personal use", and you may distribute it to others "only if you do so free of charge for non-commercial purposes". It is the same family of licence n8n uses.
For most readers this changes nothing. Running NocoDB for your own team is internal business use and is squarely permitted. It matters if you intended to build a product on top of it, resell access, or offer it to clients as part of a paid service. It also matters if your organisation has a policy that only OSI-approved licences go into production, because NocoDB no longer clears that bar.
Here is where all four actually stand, read from the repositories on 14 August 2026:
| Tool | Stars | Licence today | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|
| NocoDB | 64.5k | Sustainable Use License | Source-available, not OSI open source, since January 2026 |
| Teable | 21.7k | AGPL-3.0 for the apps, MIT for packages | Extra brand-protection terms under AGPL section 7(e) |
| Grist | 11.5k | Apache-2.0 | None worth flagging |
| Baserow | 5.6k | MIT for the open-source edition | The premium and enterprise directories ship under separate proprietary licences |
Grist is the only one of the four under a plain, permissive, OSI-approved licence with no directories carved out.
The four worth knowing
NocoDB is the closest thing to Airtable's interface, and it is the reason most people find this category at all. It wraps an existing database rather than replacing it, so you can point it at a Postgres you already run and get a grid, gallery and kanban view over tables that other applications are also writing to. That is genuinely useful and it is the feature the alternatives find hardest to match.
Teable is the newest of the four and the most spreadsheet-shaped. It sits on Postgres and leans on real tables underneath, so your data stays queryable with ordinary SQL rather than living in an application-specific blob. The core applications are AGPL, which is a stricter obligation than MIT if you plan to modify and distribute it, and worth reading before you fork anything.
Baserow is the most conventionally open of the group for the parts that are open. The core edition is MIT, and the pieces most teams eventually want - richer views, single sign-on, role-based access, audit logging - live in the premium and enterprise directories under their own licences. Nothing about that is hidden, but it does mean "Baserow is MIT" is only true of the edition you get before you need any of that.
Grist is the odd one out and the one worth a look if the others feel like a bad fit. It is closer to a spreadsheet with a real relational model and Python formulas than to an Airtable clone, it is Apache-2.0 throughout, and it is the option with the fewest strings if licence purity matters to you.
What it costs to run
A self-hosted base is two containers: the application and a Postgres. Our NocoDB stack is exactly that, pinned to a specific release of each, with a volume for the application data and a volume for the database.
The bill stops tracking your headcount and starts tracking the machine, which is the entire point of the exercise. Whether that is cheaper depends on how many seats you were paying for. At three or four users it usually is not. At twenty read-only stakeholders it is not close.
If you want it running without building the infrastructure underneath it, the stack deploys from our catalogue onto a plan that starts at $5 a month flat and holds every other service you run alongside it. The comparison that matters is per-seat against per-machine, not per-seat against free.
The part self-hosting does not replace
Airtable is not only a grid. It is also the automations that fire reliably, the integrations that someone else keeps working when a third-party API changes, and the fact that when a base breaks at 9am there is a company whose job it is to fix it.
Self-hosting moves all of that to you. The backups are yours to test, the upgrades are yours to schedule, and the Postgres is yours to keep alive. None of it is difficult. All of it is now a thing you own, and it is worth being honest that the saving is partly a transfer of work rather than a pure discount.
When to stay
Stay on Airtable if the automations and integrations are doing real work in your business, if the people using it are non-technical and the interface is why they use it at all, or if you are small enough that the seat count is not the problem you think it is. Two people paying for Team is $480 a year, and it will take you longer than that to become good at operating a database you did not previously run.
Move if your seat count is growing for reasons that have nothing to do with usage, if the data needs to sit somewhere specific for compliance reasons, or if you want other applications reading the same tables directly.
Frequently asked questions
Is NocoDB still open source? Not in the OSI sense. Since January 2026 it ships under the Sustainable Use License, which permits internal business, personal and non-commercial use but not commercial redistribution. It is source-available. If your requirement is specifically an OSI-approved licence, Grist under Apache-2.0 is the closest equivalent in this group.
Which one is the most like Airtable? NocoDB, by a distance, both in interface and in how quickly an Airtable user gets productive in it.
Can these connect to a database I already have? NocoDB is the one designed for it - it presents views over existing tables rather than requiring you to import into its own store. The others prefer to own their schema.
What do I need to run one? The application container, a Postgres, and somewhere to keep two volumes. Any small instance is enough for a team-sized base. The work is not the resources, it is remembering that backups are now your responsibility.
Do I lose the automations? The Airtable-native ones, yes. Every tool here has some form of hooks or an API, and most self-hosted setups end up pairing one of them with a separate automation tool rather than expecting the base to do both.