I want to investigate tools for quickly building data applications and thought Budibase was the most promising candidate. Since the main pitch is ease of getting something useful up and running, they have put together a quick start guide to serve as a lightning tour of product features. Their effort to make a great first impression certainly worked on me.

Minimizing barriers to entry, we are pointed to their cloud-hosted service where we register to create our quick start app without worrying about setup or deployment. Then a sample database is only one click away. I examined the sample database and found a decently structured example with multiple tables and relationships between them. I had expected to see an easy single table database and was impressed they gave us something more representative of real world applications.

Once sample database tables were in place, the tour takes us to the interface design screen. One of the default templates is an editable table that would be comfortably familiar for any spreadsheet user. Simple data navigation like sorting by a column or searching in a column works much the same way as well, except this editable table also has a basic ability to interact with relational database tables.

If the goal is to take a small first step away from abusing Excel as a database, Budibase lives up to its promise. It really did take only a few minutes to set up a web app that presents an Excel-like interface but with underlying relational database capabilities managed with web app access control and data validation capabilities. It's a credible "Minimal Viable Product" and if that's all somebody needs, they can stop right there and have a perfectly usable tool.

But of course that is only the beginning. The real power comes from building interfaces better tailored to the task at hand instead of a spreadsheet-like table. For data entry, Budibase offers the usual set of form elements (text entry, number entry) plus a few intriguing surprises (file attachment upload?) Playing around with these tools I got the distinct feeling this section of Budibase is aiming to surpass Google Forms for ease of use. [UPDATE: Yep, there's a page in Budibase documentation dedicated to pitching itself against Google Forms.] I'm not enough of a Google Forms user to judge if Budibase has succeeded, but I see no reason why I need to go back to Google Forms.

This quick start guide ends with links to other sections in Budibase documentation for further exploration. I like what I see so far, and I want to continue exploring, but on my own self-hosted instance instead of their cloud-hosted one.