Hello 
,
Is there a blog talking about the difference with that open source project Pocketbase ?
or it’s completely not comparable
Thanks
U meant this pocketbase? I think it’s in the league of Xano or Backendless. Not comparable to Grist
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oki thank you 
yes I was talking about this Open Source project.
I tested Pocketbase this weekend, and this is certainly an alternative toGrist and daresay a potentially serious competitor to every nocode database tool out there. I love Grist and ultimately Grist is a much more proven platform with several features that are lacking in Pocketbase, as I list below, but Pocketbase provides some new critical features that Grist strangely lacks. Pocketbase is still very, very new, but the fact that they have implemented so many core features already is quite impressive.
So here are some details: Both Grist and Pocketbase rely on SQLite on the backend. Grist is certainly more mature and offers formula based fields, access rules, and multiple views. So in those respects it simply destroys Pocketbase in terms of functionality. There is much you can do on Grist that is still impossible with Pocketbase, though that could change soon.
However, even though it lacks alot of Grist’s functionality, Pocketbase is innovative in other respects. For example, Pocketbase allows for unique fields in the database out of the box! Grist still strangely relies on a “hack” of setting of an isDup field type formula field for this most basic of all database constraints. But this is just a simple improvement (of many actually). A much bigger improvement is that Pocketbase can be installed on any Linux server with complete auth/admin/APIs in about 5 minutes! There is literally nothing to do but upload an executable and issue a one line command, and boom you have an amazing backend and APIs. Grist is nearly impossible to set up unless you are some sort of server expert. Grist is making progress with its omnibus package, but for most people this is still not easy. I’m an idiot when it comes to server, but even I was able to set up Pocketbase in minutes with full auth, all the API’s etc. This was revolutionary to me.
A few other basic improvements: Image handling in fields is much better in Pocketbase. Pocketbase automatically handles createdAt and updatedAt for you, a major annoyance when using Grist. And then finally, Pocketbase is designed to be extended to use a framework. It’s not easy yet, but the platform design is there. So you could easily foresee using Pocketbase soon as a backend for an app, while the same cannot be said for Grist at this point. Finally, Pocketbases’s Rest API (SDK) is strangely much more advanced that Grist’s. The Grist API is quite primitive actually, which is not necessarily a bad thing, depending on your needs. But ultimately, if you want to build some sort of app using a data backend, you will need a more sophisticated api.
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