Glide

Glide delivers on its promise of turning spreadsheets into apps, and it does so with a polish that sets it apart from other no-code builders. After building several internal tools—an employee directory, a field inspection app, and an inventory tracker—the speed from idea to working app is genuinely impressive. What takes weeks with traditional development takes hours with Glide, and the resulting apps look and feel native on mobile devices thanks to PWA technology. The spreadsheet-as-database approach is both Glide's greatest strength and its primary limitation. For teams already organizing data in Google Sheets or Excel, the transition is seamless—your existing data becomes the app's backend instantly. Computed columns and relations add database-like capabilities without SQL knowledge. However, as data complexity grows, the spreadsheet model strains. Applications needing complex joins, transactions, or real-time sync across many users will hit performance walls. Glide Tables (their native database) partially addresses this but remains simpler than dedicated backends. The template library is excellent for common business use cases—CRM, project tracker, event management, inventory—and serves as both inspiration and starting point. User authentication and row-level permissions enable apps that show different data to different users, which is essential for business tools. Pricing is reasonable: the free plan is useful for prototyping, and the Starter plan at $25/month per app unlocks custom branding and up to 10 users. The Pro plan at $99/month per app supports 50 users with advanced features and integrations, and the Business plan at $249/month scales to 100 users with advanced permissions. We recommend Glide for teams building internal tools, field apps, and operational software where speed of deployment matters more than complex backend logic. It fills the gap between "we need a spreadsheet" and "we need to hire developers" brilliantly. For customer-facing apps at scale or complex enterprise software, look to traditional development or more robust platforms like Retool.