Stacker vs Softr | Custom No Code Interfaces | Updated for 2022

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Table of Contents: 📖 👇

00:00 - What this video covers
01:18 - Coming Clean
02:14 - Comparison Reference
03:52 - Data Update Timing
05:45 - Pricing Comparison
10:13 - Feature Comparison
13:42 - Editing your Data
14:31 - How to Get More Help!

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#GAPConsulting #GarethPronovost #Airtable

[sweroc]

I think the fact that Softr supports responsive design out of the box is really important and saves a lot of testing. I also found their support to be amazing.

[joshuahsu]

Bro. You're channel is the go-to resource whenever I'm looking into no-code tools to integrate into different projects. Especially ones with AirTable (which is pretty much all of them).

Plus, the fact that you keep up to date content is amazing. Much appreciated :)

[acjnas]

I like that you have made an update on this comparison. And one of the reasons softr seems to be leading the race is the attention that they pay to the community insights.

Probably softr is not comparable to stacker in some aspects, but softr has never stopped pushing updates, adding new features, and re-engineering the ones that are most often used. I never get to use stacker because they weren't very friendly on their usage plans, I mean I wanted to test the app, but I had to pay, and my company should be of a certain size and also make a certain amount of money to apply to their entry usage plan.

The first time I meet softr, I felt welcome to try the app. I have been using it for almost one year, I have built several apps, and knowing that any of the pricing plans support unlimited apps is so relieving to continue learning and working on their platform.

I am sure that they will improve their forms (I am sure because forms have gotten many updates ) and I hope that they could get to the level of mini extensions forms (the king of airtable based forms )

[ninebirdsrising]

Gareth been watching your videos since Stacker launched - your original mention of it prompted me to migrate part of our service to Airtable with a Stacker front-end. This was a very successful experiment - I found the stacker team to be enthusiastic, responsive and inventive. However as time went by and they introduced new features, some areas of their solution - particularly the user permissioning, roles and associated settings - became overly complex. I know this is an issue that they are working on. About a year ago we looked at Softr and created a small service using their system - the main reason being the ability to create a public facing page (still not possible in Stacker). Since then they have gone from strength to strength and we have now migrated all our off-platform (ie not proprietary) applications to Softr. However I remain impressed and convinced by the Stacker team's technical ability and enthusiasm and I'm sure that they will find a way to refocus their business. Looking forward to your next update on this in six months'time! Great videos - many thanks for all the effort you put in.

[elimagzimof]

You didn't mention about the membership payment which is only availble in Softr - makes a big difference IMO

[DustinGood]

Dang, just started building with softr and didn't realize I need their top tier subscription in order to use permissions. Makes me wonder if I should look elsewhere to build out my app idea. Any recommendations? The main use of permissions would've been for logged in members to edit other users records in airtable. I want users to be able to assign themselves to a task and add their own photo to the record.

[nathanarant]

Does this video still reflect your opinions and the current feature sets of these two tools? Just thought I'd ask since it's been 9 months and the last one expired in only 6!

[hosedog]

Thank for creating this video! I have been using Stacker as an internal tool for my ops team for several months. I liked how the layout limitations of Stacker allow for the creation of an app very quickly. I found that Softr's advanced design capabilities slowed me down. That said, I'm thinking of giving Softr another try for the reasons you cover. In your video you mention editing data, however you didn't cover data input. Does Softr now have more user-friendly forms for data input? I remember data entry being clunky when I originally compared that feature to Stacker.

[russelljfindlay]

Great video as ever Gareth.

I have found Stacker is faster to create a simple internal tool - we use it to manage a freelance team who all have access to their work, invoices etc.

Building through Softr gives options to make a much more attractive UI for end user needs and integrate with non airtable content so have used this too.

I haven’t built anything on softr for a few months - but from memory last time did find “create new record” challenging - I wanted to be able to create new records that were effectively in a junction table and needed a long work around - is this sort of thing solved now ?

[denis_hesse]

Thank you for this very instructive video and also for your excellent elocution for us French people (and maybe others) which changes from the "porridge for cats" that we have to endure too often ;)

I thought I had found the magic formula to get started : free Softr + free Gsheets = everything free :)) but no! Either you have to pay Stacker to use free Gsheets or pay Airtable with free Softr.

So my question is: Regarding Stacker and until one day Softr can use Gsheets, what would be the differences, limitations to use in back end wether Gsheets or Airtable?

[khuned]

Hi Gareth, there seems to be a new player in Glide, and the fact that Benchmark is their Series A investor should say a lot. Have you taken a look at their platform and I was wondering if they are positioning to compete with Softr and Adalo? or also compete with Stacker? I am saying this believing that Stacker (with all it's limitations) is still the easiest and quickest way to get business-process web apps, or internal tools, up and running.

Any thoughts would really be appreciated. Cheers, Khuned

[tommycoe]

I use stacker for internal tool where users interact with more data. I use stacker for external users where users only interact with a limited amount of data. Is this antiquated thinking?

[augustincloutier]

I tried Softr and the biggest issue I ran into is the way it handles linked records between table. ''links'' are simply determined based on filters using lookups.

For example, let's take a classic user detail page containing a list of tasks assigned to this user. In Softr, What makes a task appear in that list is the value in the email lookup field that you previously had to add in the Airtable tasks table. This means that a user cannot ''create'' (Add) an additional task, or link to an existing task. In stacker, a user do has that capability to create links to records from another table if he's allowed to.

Maybe there is something I miss here or there is an easy workaround for that. Anyway, just wanted to mention it.

[rs]

Have you checked out DrapCode? It's the happy medium between Bubble and Stacker. Definitely worth a look!

[hughgallagher]

Even though softr has a free tier... it's pretty much useless at 200 records. A couple of membership users in and it would breach limits easily, so because of that I still can't truly test out an idea in softr.

[ambroisedhenain]

I feel like you don't point out the most important thing, they're not comparable tools, they never were and they never will be.

Your whole comparison is irrelevant. Stacker is made to build internal tools behind authentication, while Soft is made to build public websites, mostly marketing websites, and has the ability to provide auth and membership.

You wanna build a nice website your grandma can have a look at? Go with Softr.
You wanna build a strong back-office for managing your daily business? Go with Stacker.

Softr is simply the wrong tool for making forms, it sucks at it, don't even get me started on all the things that can go wrong if you rename a column in Airtable. Stacker will handle that (more or less gracefully)

[paulbridgman]

Despite how much I like the visual appeal of Softr, there is one issue that makes Stacker the only plausible solution for us - Softr cannot load from an Airtable base that has thousands of records. It seems to be because Softr is trying to read the information directly from Airtable unlike Stacker that syncs our data into their own database in the background which means that the data loads instantly.
This is a real shame because Softr's interface design and flexibility is very appealing indeed. But we have no choice but to stick with Stacker.

[schelletick]

I respectfully disagree that Softr is better, and I truly believe these are not comparable. Yes, Softr is great for pretty web apps, so is WebFlow and many others, but for data heavy apps, no it is not. If you want to build an app, that you want to grow and develop into "software" with 1000's of end users then Softr is not the choice.

I would choose Stacker for that due to the options of Data Sources, either with built in Stacker Tables or full Postgres databases. Softr gives you Airtable and soon Google Sheets, which is fine for smaller public facing apps, but when you get to a million records, no thanks. This is why I say they are not comparable.

Don't get me wrong, I love Softr, but not for business apps with complexity and large data sets.