Grist for the mill

A Brussels-based umbrella organisation recently came to me looking for assistance finding software that would help them track products and standards monitored by their member groups across different European countries.

They’d been using an old Filemaker database (you’re old like me if you recognise that name) which was still happily chugging along, but they needed modern integrations and wanted a self-hosted and/or European option.

A lot of searching, reading, and testing was involved. Lots of venture-backed platforms that were betting on future lock-in were found, but we finally settled on Grist. It’s a bit like Airtable, but with a major difference: it’s open-source so you can self-host it if you wish. It’s not European, although some branches of the French government have contributed quite a lot of code to the project (a public investment in the digital commons that Europe should be doing a lot more of).

It’s been running smoothly for a while and they’re so happy with it that they now want to build a custom CRM with it too. That's what happens when you give people tools they control: they build more stuff.

So, if you need a database-spreadsheet hybrid, I recommend Grist without reservation. I’ve just proposed it for another project and I’ll probably start using it myself.

Colin