The application looks and feels nice, but the per-device pricing/licensing model seems severely outdated to me. I will not make a purchase unless named licenses, which enable me to use the application on all devices and operating systems I use (with reasonable limits if DRM is needed for some reason), are available.
Right, it's not like their cost of production is proportional to the number of computers the software is used in. It's like trying to buy a vacuum cleaner and being charged per room you plan to use it in.
Whatever both buyer and seller agree on. I think in general buyers can agree that, by the nature of software and the existence of the internet, if people share their bought software like they would any other object, then the seller risks not being able to make any profit at all. Since sharing software is copying software, there's no equivalent of "returning" what was borrowed. It's a compromise most buyers can understand.
However, charging per machine of the same user seems to cross the line, no? Sellers are pushing, and I think it's valid here for buyers to push back.
EDIT: Could we have the courtesy of including explanatory replies with downvotes? Simply downvoting seems like the equivalent of replying, "No. Shut up."
Go with data grip then. I’m pretty sure it can be installed on every machine. At least that’s what I do, and I see no reason to switch other than their lack of official support for non-relational databases. It’s otherwise solid software.
I tend to agree. I'm not sure about all devices but a license being install-able on somewhere between 2 to 5 devices seems reasonable.
I'll be a paying customer but I need a little flexibility. I use more than one computer and some other devices - I don't need an SQL tool on all of them but definitely on more than one.
You can also get TablePlus though a Setapp[1] subscription. (Unfortunately Setapp is also licensed on a per device basis, but you get 2 Macs out of box and you could buy extra seats at $5/mo/seat.[2] I think named licenses are hard to offer because a lot of people abuse them by sharing with coworkers and friends.)
Having used TablePlus for a couple months with both Postgres and SQLite, I only have positive things to say.
For Mac apps, one can simply bind the license to the user's name, with some allowance for edit distance (and a few automated name changes), which can solve the casual license sharing. Adding a "Licensed to John Smith" message during load time also helps with this.
This is an odd hill to die on. I'd bet 90%+ of engineers have a single computer they code from at home (even if you have multiple computers) and another at work. It's perfectly fair to pay for a separate license for each of those use cases. I'd prefer this to some $10/month SAAS model.
No it’s not. I have a desktop and 2 laptops. My desktop has 3 OSes, Mac windows and Linux. Why the hell would I buy this, and then have to think really hard about which one I’ll use with it?
I probably feel too strongly about this. Last week I setup a nytimes cooking subscription and then immediately canceled it when I realize I had to leave it on auto pay or else it wouldn’t work.
Just having a desktop and a laptop is enough to kill this product for me, I’m not paying twice when it’s only me using it. It shows disrespect for the user, or at least ignorance.
No other paid software I use does that. Sketchup, Sublime, Jetbrains, and Office for instance.
Disagreed. I have a MBP, a Linux desktop and a Thinkpad running both Linux and Windows. My one subscription to a Jetbrains product covers all of them provided I don't run the program at the same time across multiple machines.
Believing that most engineers only have one computer IMO seems out of touch with reality.
> And also includes their database tool, DataGrip.
Which is awesome by itself. I use it regularly and only have minor issues with some of it's behavior, but the experience is worlds-ahead than what I've encountered previously at that price point.
Like the other response on this says. Tables in MySQL (and individual columns, and databases) have an encoding associated with them, this determines what characters you can store in them.
Right now I cannot modify that in Datagrip, but worse, I cannot even see it without a raw query.
The point was that the pricing of this product is _not a subscription_ so perhaps the pricing makes sense. Your response is to describe a subscription product. I am not sure I understand what you were trying to say.
I have a laptop, a home computer, a work computer and I have all my tools on all of them. I bet that is more the norm than not. The license should be associated with the person not the device.
I do not find that model outdated at all. Actually a good bunch of apps I use have that model (e.g. Alfred App, Ableton Live...).
Also, TablePlus seems to be selling well (at least from what I see around me), so I am not personally of the opinion that they should change their model!
I'm confused. I have licenses for both Alfred and Ableton, and both of them run on all my devices just fine. Ableton in particular allows a limited number of authorizations, but handles my laptop and desktop.
A lot of them just are on the local network. Like Jetbrains software will throw a license error if both are on the same internal network, but will be fine if they are on separate networks.
I moved my entire team to this program because of how simple (and reasonably hard to screw up) it is. It's also incidentally one of the cheapest non-buggy tools you can use to access redshift. Even if you buy multiple licenses it's cheaper than navicat et al.
Also to note that their free version is still _very_ usable, I survived on that itself for many months spending hours in the tool.
I am totally fine with the license model. I have been using TablePlus for over 2 years. When I first tried it I had a few questions/issues and the developer responded immediately and made changes based on feedback. (the email thread is 42 msgs :)).
I have been using it daily for pg, mysql, occasionally for redis and sqllite, it works great and gets continuous improvements. I wish this company all the best, great product, great support.
I have a single license for TablePlus right now. I do have another machine, but it's effectively a "spare" / "travel" machine, so I don't use it a lot.
If I happen to need TP next time I'm using that machine, the cost of adding another seat to the license is offset by some fraction of an hours billable work, and lasts for a year.
What's always missing from these type of discussions is the consideration that just maybe, offering it as per-seat rather than per-person is why the price is what it is.
Would you prefer it it was per-person but cost $99 for a licence, with a year of updates?
Sure, that gives you the warm fuzzy feeling, and benefits anyone with > 2 machines, but it doubles the price for those who only need one seat under the current scheme.
I'm lucky enough to be paid pretty well for my skills and experience, and I (or technically my company) can maintain some software and release it as open source. But I'm also very aware that high quality fully native developer tools are quite few and far between, and the number that are also cross platform is miniscule. There is significant competition from things built using "cross platform runtimes" (Electron, Java). So when one comes along that is as good as this, they could charge twice what they do and I'd pay happily - but not everyone can justify/afford that much on developer tools.
Like some others have said. Getting it via Setapp is great. The prices aren’t far from one another and Setapp offers other apps. Setapp has the device limitation too, but since it’s basically the same price, add a few more seats if needed.
Setapp lets you use apps on as many devices as you want. But like streaming services these days, you can only have apps through Setapp actively running based on the seats you have. Though if you have say 2-3 seats for Setapp. And launch Setapp and some apps on a 4th comp. whichever comp has to get off Setapp to give space, you can usually keep apps open. Just can’t re-open them until a seat space is available again. M
I love the licensing model. No crappy "pay us for the privilege of using the software every month and year" like Adobe does. Just plain perpetual licence like Affinity. We need more projects like that.
Except it's licensed per computer and not per seat. I'm not sure what they're trying to achieve with it. I have two personal devices, not to mention dual booting Linux some of the time.
Perpetual license but not perpetual updates. And you have to pay per device instead of per seat.
I think the pricing is low enough to overcome these annoyances but I’d rather pay double and not have to be concerned with buying another license when I dual boot another OS.
I do agree, that it would be nice to pay per seat, not per computer.
I develop on Mac 95% of the time, so I own a license on Mac, but on Windows I just use the free version because I don't use it on Windows enough to justify paying for it on that device, despite the fact I am a paying customer. This is an annoyance for me. However, I rarely run into any of the free-version limitations on Windows since I am usually just logging in quickly to check on something on Windows and not doing anything major. If I need to do some hardcore work I pull it up on my mac, which has a better dev environment. But it is extremely annoying the few times when I do go to open several tabs on WIndows and remember that despite being a paying customer, I can not use these paid features because I am using it on the wrong platform.
I don't have a problem with the perpetual license that doesn't include perpetual updates. To me, if you are using the tool that often, you can support the team that builds something that you most likely make money off using. One year of updates for TablePlus is nearly equivalent to a month of updates from Adobe. At $60 a year we are talking about $5 a month. Which is very little to most developers, who purchase $6 coffees and $15 salads without batting an eye.
But I would like to see a per-seat option. Especially because I most likely wouldn't/couldn't use two different computers at the same time, it seems fair to let me install it on a few OS's if I desire.
I've been using it for the past year and it's my go to app for managing PG databases. As much as I love SQL, TablePlus makes certain actions like inserts/updates/import really convenient especially when you're working with dev databases.
Don't know if the person who posted this has an affiliation, I do not, but I'm a huge fan of TablePlus so feel it's still worth it for me to comment about this.
It offers so many features that seem so natural. Quick editability which in some cases saves a ton of time. Tabs for different tables, plain text editing for queries with highlighting for ease of reading. There are other database interactors, that do the same thing, but really for me, I've found the UI/UX looks and feels so much better than others, and as a user, that really is a huge part of it.
As for the licensing price, I started by trying it out in the free, two tab version. I then stepped back and thought about how for me, the benefit it gave me was well worth $60.
Again, I have nothing to do with them, but for how nice it's been for me, I feel it deserves a shoutout.
I've been using TablePlus for a long time now as well. I don't have any affiliation but started with their mac app. It was easily the best DB GUI out there. I like that you can use the same GUI for PostgreSQL, MYSQL, Redis, MongoDB, and SQLite (there are even more than this, but these are the ones I use).
It is awesome to have one very powerful and well-maintained program for all my database needs. I can get proficient at one tool and use it for everything. In addition, I can pay 1 licensing fee and get access to a powerful tool for working with all of these databases, instead of needing a separate tool for each one (which was the case in the past).
The pricing model is EXTREMELY FAIR in my opinion. First of all, it is free to use in its entirety forever, with only a small handful of limitations. New devs will easily be satisfied with the free version. You can upgrade to support them and to remove the few limitations in the free version for just $60. This is well worth any developer's time as it accounts for only an hour or two of their wages most likely. I also like that it is a perpetual license, so you don't need to "subscribe" if you don't want to. You do need to renew if you want newer versions, as the $60 license only covers 1 year of updates. But i think that this is a great balance between being fair (it is perpetual at the version + 12mos that you bought it at), while also incentivizing and allowing to support further development. Finally offering a generous free version supports newbies and the dev community.
Lastly I need to point out an often-overlooked reason to consider TablePlus. They offer tools on every platform (Mac, Windows, Linux). And MOST IMPORTANTLY, this isn't an electron application. Each version is maintained by a seperate team (from my understanding) within their business and it is built on the native language and frameworks for that platform.
About 1.5-2 years ago I started a discussion on their forum about bringing a version to Linux (at the time it was only Windows and Mac). The forum post quickly started gaining momentum from other Linux users who discussed how there is quite literally NO good DB GUI on Linux (other than the CLI). Let alone something as easy to use and powerful as TablePlus. The team eventually committed to a Linux version, and after a year of development updates I was invited to the beta and had been using it ever since.
This team really is great and I highly recommend trying their tool for free and upgrading to the paid version if you find it useful, which I think any developer will.
That sounds impressive, if not unbelievable, they have 2 employees listed on their LinkedIn, and only 3 listed on their website. Maybe they are using offshore developers for a lot of the heavy lifting, but I honestly don’t see how they could have native apps for 3 platforms that have this much functionality with that many employees. Anyone else have insight?
Why not? Two full time developers is plenty if you don't have the overhead of management processes, and everyone has a unified vision. Sublime Text was a one-man show until relatively recently. It's a single cross-platform codebase, but he built the cross-platform abstraction layer himself! Presumably this has the underlying database logic in some kind of shared library.
The 3 native code bases are impressive. Early on it was very Mac centric, the Windows client used to lag way behind in features. The last time I checked, Windows had all the features I expected from the Mac version.
The new Linux client might be a good example of where the Windows client was a year/ year and a half ago. It works, but lacking a lot still. I’m confident they will continue to iterate and get it up to speed soon.
Big fan of Table Plus here. I like the ease of use and the clean UI. It’s everything you need, and nothing you don’t. Very smooth workflow.
In the end you only need to implement UI layer when the business logic is separated out. Not that the business logic on the different platforms can't be tricky but I think most time is spend on the native UI implementation. That's how I would go about it.
I am glad it's not Elektron. I am also using TablePlus and enjoying it a lot!
What does it give me that DBeaver doesn't? I use DBeaver daily for work but would consider paying for a better tool if I can see what is better about it.
I've just found the Linux alpha release (build 52) [1], and so I've installed it. This is just alpha and probably missing features, one being that it doesn't seem possible to connect to Oracle. MySQL was available so I tried connecting to a local instance of that that DBeaver connects to and it failed to connect.
There are some UI glitches, but it is alpha software. I do like the simple UI; DBeaver does feel very busy in comparison. I'll keep updating as it progresses through alpha and see how it improves.
DBeaver is my go to free option as well, but I am a big Table Plus fan as well.
The thing I think it gives you is a smooth, frictionless workflow. The UI is simple & uncluttered. Everything you need for the most common tasks is easy to find.
Totally agree. When I'm on Mac, I go with Sequel Pro, but on Linux DBeaver is unfortunately the best. It's not bad, its just way too cluttered. I am liking the direction Table Plus Linux is going.
DBeaver UI is definitely too busy, but I found that when I figured out where everything is, it's pretty nice. I bailed on Sequel Pro for Table Plus recently on my Mac because I needed to work on a version 8.x DB.
I bet the Linux TablePlus will be up to speed in features by the end of the year.
I have been testing the free version and there are a few things which i find annoying:
1. Importing large SQL files into DB is slow, SequelPro seems to be much faster;
2. No option to add/delete connection when you choose "Show connections";
3. Maybe it is a free limitation but almost every time i want to open a table it wants to create a new tab;
4. It doesn't want to reconnect to the server (even when cmd +r) if it lost connection - must close and open server again;
5. I have noticed that 2 different databases which are exact copies (structurally) have different column order so doing simple cmd + c in one DB and then cmd + v will mess up the data as the column order is different.
Back about a year and a half ago I was having some issues with the fuzzy search being laggy and submitted a feature request. The dev responded and had a beta for me to try out within a day or two. Overall it’s a great product. Definitely one of the best db clients out there. Only reason I stopped using recently is because my team got an all access IDEA license so I switched over to datagrip
These products all do more or less the same thing. If Valentina Studio free version supports your DBs of choice, I've found it to suit my needs perfectly well - Postgres user here. Oh, did I mention it's free?
These products should have a mandatory feature comparison chart to their competition - it'd speed up the inevitable decline of mediocre competition that relies on gaming google search results for its survival. I back in the day had to download and suffer through half a dozen DB clients that do the same thing slightly differently.
I like tableplus a lot and used it mainly as a redis GUI (we have a querious license at work so i use that for sql).
I did encounter some wierd things around version 290
it seems that when you use a filter (which is called "advanced filter" not sure why) on a mac everything works but the same filtering action was blocked for the free version on my windows machine. some versions later it was also blocked on my mac but i cant seem to find any way to filter redis keys at all. other than that i really like everything else
Has anyone compared this to Navicat? Our non profit has a non commercial license for Navicat Premium, and I just love the product (despite more than a few quirks).
The community edition is updated more often than i would like and sometimes features break but bugs get fixed quickly and they add usefull stuff all the time.
Dont know what i would do if i was stuck with pgAdmin...
it seems the guy releasing nightly builds even don't have permission to merge. I don't know why no one folk and release a fix version with active members
I'm using it on daily basis but it's not a smooth experience. I'm not sure if it's just me that very time I switch to a new database in dbeaver and start running a different query ... more often than not it's just stuck there for more than half min and eventually told me it's not connected to the new database yet so I had to refresh the connection. For all the SQL tools I've used, dbeaver takes the the longest to realize it's actually not connected to a db. It's not fun.
As someone who likes Postico but has some frustrations with it, I've been considering giving TablePlus a try. Can you describe some of the ways TablePlus falls short compared to Postico?
Just tried that and it did autocomplete, for example 'dal' to 'django_admin_log'. It did not auto-suggest it while typing, but when I pressed control-space it expanded it.
Agreed. The only thing it probably doesn't satisfy here is lightweight (being built on Eclipse). But actually one of the things that keeps me with it is that being built on Eclipse I can use a whole bunch of Eclipse plugins that have have from that environment and they work great.
Agree as well! Best SQL IDE for Oracle/PostgreSQL. It uses the same IDE framework that eclipse use. So you can quickly get familiar with and even use the same shortcuts.
I tried many free alternatives and for a long time I am using valentina studio. It requires registration for free version license key. It has nearly all features that I need with in free version.
TablePlus is awesome! I got it through Setapp and it completely any need I had for SequelPro which I feel got shittier in the last couple of years (no new features and it feels super laggy nowadays).
I can confirm with a very little spelunking that the Mac app is a real native AppKit/Cocoa app. It appears to mostly be written in Swift, but also uses a fair amount of Objective-C. They've said publicly that the Windows version is written in C# and C/C++. Not sure what they did for Linux...
I work with SQL Server. I really like general multi-db GUI tools like this, but also wonder if one is giving up a lot of power.
SQL Server's free native tool is SSMS (SQL Server Management Studio), which is one of the most powerful SQL clients I've ever used. (despite my carryover reservations with MS products from the 1980s-90s, SQL Server is indisputably an innovative and solid piece of technology -- MS did something right with their database group). One can interact syntactically with the database via pure SQL, but SSMS lets you access the deep corners of the database quickly via a GUI (SQL is a great query language, but many admin/ops tasks are much more easily done via a GUI -- writing SQL every time you want make a simple change is tedious plus nobody remembers the syntax for infrequently used features). Some of the features I use regularly: row/column/covering index creation, linked servers, user management, live query plans, create/alter script generation from existing objects (stored proc, view, index, table, etc.). I've never seen these features exposed in any third party SQL GUI client.
Postgres has a bunch of very powerful features too, and I've never seen these exposed in GUI tools.
Jetbrains' DataGrip comes the closest, but because it needs to support lowest common denominator features across databases, it doesn't expose deep features either.
I wonder if folks are giving up deep feature discovery by using an generic GUI SQL client.
Exception: Oracle SQL Developer. It's native to Oracle but is quite unpleasant to use.
Edit: read the parent wrong, but leaving my comment here so it doesn’t look like backtracking some offensive content.
> wonder if one is giving up a lot of power.
That’s an irrational concern. GUI tools also come with SQL consoles where you can do anything that’s possible in the CLI. With the added benefit of results being presented in a nicer way.
So for SQL Server, you can't really see the live query plan (real-time plan + statistics while the query is running) without the GUI. You cannot see the Activity Monitor without the GUI. There are elements that cannot be accessed via pure SQL. 3rd party GUIs generally don't support these features.
I think you’ve missed wenc’s point - they aren’t arguing for a CLI, they’re arguing for a UI specialized to a single RDBMS, vs one trying to convert many RDBMSs.
If you've used SSMS extensively you'll know it's tailored to SQL server like a glove. You'd definitely be leaving usability on the table going with a generic DB client. The person you've responded to even mentioned that of course you can do all things via CLI, but SSMS builds powerful GUI layer on top of that
How do you deal with the complete lack of searching for tables/SPs/functions in SSMS? There are a number of 3rd party extensions but they all seem slow and still just jump you to the entity in the explorer.
The speed of searching for anything in DataGrip is just so beautiful and amazing for productivity. A big downside is we have run into situations where a SP is cached and is an old version and DataGrip doesn’t notify me that’s the case.
> How do you deal with the complete lack of searching for tables/SPs/functions in SSMS?
That is a weakness of SSMS, and I've no good answers.
For stuff like SQL formatting though, the free ApexSQL Refactor [1] has been a godsend for me. I write a lot of complex analytic queries and having the ability to tidy up statements as I'm writing the query is amazing.
GUI search is awful, but it does exist. Right clicking on an object type node (e.g. 'Tables' or 'Procedures' in the object explorer) and selecting the 'Filter' option gives you a limited search feature for objects in that node.
It is clumsy and painful, and I will most often just query the sys schema to search for objects, but GUI search is there.
>> I wonder if folks are giving up deep feature discovery by using an generic GUI SQL client.
SSMS, unfortunately, is missing a ton of features that 3rd-party clients have mastered -- instant search/filter through query results, quick aggregating of numeric results (min max, sum, avg, sd, etc), sorting on any column, exporting to multiple formats, filtering of schema objects, charts from query results -- just off the top of my head. They also enable many tasks via GUI like creating/editing table schemas, importing bulk data, pre-query variable substitution, etc.
SSMS is free, and should be installed whenever one needs to interface with SQL Server, but good 3rd party clients are generally better at 90+% of common tasks, while SSMS only needs to be used for a handful of specific features that it does very well.
> SSMS, unfortunately, is missing a ton of features that 3rd-party clients have mastered -- instant search/filter through query results, quick aggregating of numeric results (min max, sum, avg, sd, etc), sorting on any column, exporting to multiple formats, filtering of schema objects, charts from query results -- just off the top of my head. They also enable many tasks via GUI like creating/editing table schemas, importing bulk data, pre-query variable substitution, etc.
---
True, those are fair points. It does depend on one's use case. Instant search/filter/sort through query results is a useful one that seems to be an omission on SSMS's part.
Quick aggregation and charting are nice to haves, but I would typically do these in Jupyter or Tableau (or Excel if it's a small dataset). These are not features most people would miss if they weren't in their SQL client. Pre-query variable substitution is a great idea, though in SSMS one can use DECLARE @var in many instances (not all) -- it's also not widely supported in 3rd party clients except for more advanced ones like DataGrip.
SSMS does have a pretty comprehensive GUI for creates/edits of schemas. Bulk data ingest can be done in multiple ways (CSV import GUI, bacpacs/dacpacs, backup/restores or using the bcp CLI that comes with SSMS) -- also bulk ingest is not a common feature in 3rd party GUIs.
Side note: for really large data ingests from Parquet etc. I write my own ETL in C# which uses the SqlBulkCopy class (or "turbodbc" in Python) for fast ETL. No GUI client I know can do this.
Kind of strange how you write about the GUI features in SSMS being awesome, but then you go to great lengths to demonstrate that GUI features in other clients are redundant.
Well, the original question I was trying to explore the question was one of what power one gives up with a generic GUI SQL client. My take is one does give up a number of database-specific features and I attempted to discuss them.
Your response lists what other clients do better than SSMS, which to me is a different question, so my reply was more in response to this question. I agree that those clients have features that SSMS does not or is weak at. I also think a handful of those features are nice to have but not really something I would expect from a SQL client so I'm neutral about them. That's all.
I believe the two questions lead to separate discussions (both of which I'm happy to engage in), and are non mutually exclusive. Other clients can have all these other nice features which SSMS doesn't, but that does not imply that that there's not still a tradeoff when it comes to their lack of native support for a database's deep features.
Been using this for a 8 months now, I really enjoy it. It's polished, and has a format sql query feature that is useful for that final step once you have your query down to what you want it. Very nice stuff.
I like TablePlus and have bought licenses for my work computers. It’s got a lot features, but is still rough around the edges in some spots: Mongo is technically supported but the viewing and editing experience isn’t great for nested object. The SSH support seems wonky: I can’t get it to work with my ssh config which uses proxyjunp to connect. I have to setup the tunnel using -L in my terminal and use the local port in TP. I know it’s supposed to be able to use the proxy jump configs but it has just never worked for me.
I have been looking for a native app alternative to pgAdmin ever since they changed it over to a browser based application. I will have to check this out. Actually, if people have suggestions, I'll listen!
I have used both Postico and Tableplus extensively, and if you are sure that you are going to be working with Postgres only, its the better, more Mac-like app.
However, both are a serious upgrade over PgAdmin :)
I’ve been using this as a part of my Setapp subscription and loving it. It’s the only tool that has replaced DBeaver (which is still more powerful, but I hate the interface).
I use both TablePlus and DynamoDB at work. I don't see any reason to bother trying to put DynamoDB support into TablePlus.
DynamoDB is great at its one killer feature of supporting arbitrarily huge tables without you having to worry about any details. For everything else, it's just kind of adequate, considering the constraint of needing to support multi-Terabyte tables. It lacks a huge number of features that all RDBMSes have that would admittedly be impossible or not make sense on huge tables. Thus, it doesn't make much sense to try to access it from a RDBMS GUI.
The AWS Console provides all of the GUI that really makes sense for it, plus the CLI tools and API.
How does this compare to Datagrip / IntelliJ IDEA for databases in terms of functionality? I’ve been using IntelliJ for relational databases and I am very pleased with it.
I used DataGrip after SequelPro stopped updating to support MySQL 8 and apparently it's feature rich but got annoyed how it's bloated and takes half a minute to launch.
I still prefer SequelPro for it's layout and UI but finally dropped it in favor of TablePlus as now it seems close enough to that usability.
Also of note is that the author is really responsive and friendly on GitHub who corrected some minor UI issues pretty quickly when I reported.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 262 ms ] threadWhatever both buyer and seller agree on. I think in general buyers can agree that, by the nature of software and the existence of the internet, if people share their bought software like they would any other object, then the seller risks not being able to make any profit at all. Since sharing software is copying software, there's no equivalent of "returning" what was borrowed. It's a compromise most buyers can understand.
However, charging per machine of the same user seems to cross the line, no? Sellers are pushing, and I think it's valid here for buyers to push back.
EDIT: Could we have the courtesy of including explanatory replies with downvotes? Simply downvoting seems like the equivalent of replying, "No. Shut up."
I'll be a paying customer but I need a little flexibility. I use more than one computer and some other devices - I don't need an SQL tool on all of them but definitely on more than one.
Having used TablePlus for a couple months with both Postgres and SQLite, I only have positive things to say.
[1] https://setapp.com/
[2] https://setapp.com/news/setapp-launches-extra-seats
I probably feel too strongly about this. Last week I setup a nytimes cooking subscription and then immediately canceled it when I realize I had to leave it on auto pay or else it wouldn’t work.
No other paid software I use does that. Sketchup, Sublime, Jetbrains, and Office for instance.
Believing that most engineers only have one computer IMO seems out of touch with reality.
And also includes their database tool, DataGrip.
Which is awesome by itself. I use it regularly and only have minor issues with some of it's behavior, but the experience is worlds-ahead than what I've encountered previously at that price point.
I really have no clue how anyone thought that was an unnecessary feature.
Right now I cannot modify that in Datagrip, but worse, I cannot even see it without a raw query.
Also, TablePlus seems to be selling well (at least from what I see around me), so I am not personally of the opinion that they should change their model!
Also to note that their free version is still _very_ usable, I survived on that itself for many months spending hours in the tool.
No thanks. I don't rent software.
I have been using it daily for pg, mysql, occasionally for redis and sqllite, it works great and gets continuous improvements. I wish this company all the best, great product, great support.
If I happen to need TP next time I'm using that machine, the cost of adding another seat to the license is offset by some fraction of an hours billable work, and lasts for a year.
What's always missing from these type of discussions is the consideration that just maybe, offering it as per-seat rather than per-person is why the price is what it is.
Would you prefer it it was per-person but cost $99 for a licence, with a year of updates?
Sure, that gives you the warm fuzzy feeling, and benefits anyone with > 2 machines, but it doubles the price for those who only need one seat under the current scheme.
I'm lucky enough to be paid pretty well for my skills and experience, and I (or technically my company) can maintain some software and release it as open source. But I'm also very aware that high quality fully native developer tools are quite few and far between, and the number that are also cross platform is miniscule. There is significant competition from things built using "cross platform runtimes" (Electron, Java). So when one comes along that is as good as this, they could charge twice what they do and I'd pay happily - but not everyone can justify/afford that much on developer tools.
Setapp lets you use apps on as many devices as you want. But like streaming services these days, you can only have apps through Setapp actively running based on the seats you have. Though if you have say 2-3 seats for Setapp. And launch Setapp and some apps on a 4th comp. whichever comp has to get off Setapp to give space, you can usually keep apps open. Just can’t re-open them until a seat space is available again. M
Also 2019: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19160808
And another 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18004727
I think the pricing is low enough to overcome these annoyances but I’d rather pay double and not have to be concerned with buying another license when I dual boot another OS.
I develop on Mac 95% of the time, so I own a license on Mac, but on Windows I just use the free version because I don't use it on Windows enough to justify paying for it on that device, despite the fact I am a paying customer. This is an annoyance for me. However, I rarely run into any of the free-version limitations on Windows since I am usually just logging in quickly to check on something on Windows and not doing anything major. If I need to do some hardcore work I pull it up on my mac, which has a better dev environment. But it is extremely annoying the few times when I do go to open several tabs on WIndows and remember that despite being a paying customer, I can not use these paid features because I am using it on the wrong platform.
I don't have a problem with the perpetual license that doesn't include perpetual updates. To me, if you are using the tool that often, you can support the team that builds something that you most likely make money off using. One year of updates for TablePlus is nearly equivalent to a month of updates from Adobe. At $60 a year we are talking about $5 a month. Which is very little to most developers, who purchase $6 coffees and $15 salads without batting an eye.
But I would like to see a per-seat option. Especially because I most likely wouldn't/couldn't use two different computers at the same time, it seems fair to let me install it on a few OS's if I desire.
It offers so many features that seem so natural. Quick editability which in some cases saves a ton of time. Tabs for different tables, plain text editing for queries with highlighting for ease of reading. There are other database interactors, that do the same thing, but really for me, I've found the UI/UX looks and feels so much better than others, and as a user, that really is a huge part of it.
As for the licensing price, I started by trying it out in the free, two tab version. I then stepped back and thought about how for me, the benefit it gave me was well worth $60.
Again, I have nothing to do with them, but for how nice it's been for me, I feel it deserves a shoutout.
It is awesome to have one very powerful and well-maintained program for all my database needs. I can get proficient at one tool and use it for everything. In addition, I can pay 1 licensing fee and get access to a powerful tool for working with all of these databases, instead of needing a separate tool for each one (which was the case in the past).
The pricing model is EXTREMELY FAIR in my opinion. First of all, it is free to use in its entirety forever, with only a small handful of limitations. New devs will easily be satisfied with the free version. You can upgrade to support them and to remove the few limitations in the free version for just $60. This is well worth any developer's time as it accounts for only an hour or two of their wages most likely. I also like that it is a perpetual license, so you don't need to "subscribe" if you don't want to. You do need to renew if you want newer versions, as the $60 license only covers 1 year of updates. But i think that this is a great balance between being fair (it is perpetual at the version + 12mos that you bought it at), while also incentivizing and allowing to support further development. Finally offering a generous free version supports newbies and the dev community.
Lastly I need to point out an often-overlooked reason to consider TablePlus. They offer tools on every platform (Mac, Windows, Linux). And MOST IMPORTANTLY, this isn't an electron application. Each version is maintained by a seperate team (from my understanding) within their business and it is built on the native language and frameworks for that platform.
About 1.5-2 years ago I started a discussion on their forum about bringing a version to Linux (at the time it was only Windows and Mac). The forum post quickly started gaining momentum from other Linux users who discussed how there is quite literally NO good DB GUI on Linux (other than the CLI). Let alone something as easy to use and powerful as TablePlus. The team eventually committed to a Linux version, and after a year of development updates I was invited to the beta and had been using it ever since.
This team really is great and I highly recommend trying their tool for free and upgrading to the paid version if you find it useful, which I think any developer will.
The new Linux client might be a good example of where the Windows client was a year/ year and a half ago. It works, but lacking a lot still. I’m confident they will continue to iterate and get it up to speed soon.
Big fan of Table Plus here. I like the ease of use and the clean UI. It’s everything you need, and nothing you don’t. Very smooth workflow.
I am glad it's not Elektron. I am also using TablePlus and enjoying it a lot!
There are some UI glitches, but it is alpha software. I do like the simple UI; DBeaver does feel very busy in comparison. I'll keep updating as it progresses through alpha and see how it improves.
1. https://tableplus.com/blog/2019/10/tableplus-linux-installat...
The thing I think it gives you is a smooth, frictionless workflow. The UI is simple & uncluttered. Everything you need for the most common tasks is easy to find.
I bet the Linux TablePlus will be up to speed in features by the end of the year.
You never heard of DataGrip then?
1. Importing large SQL files into DB is slow, SequelPro seems to be much faster;
2. No option to add/delete connection when you choose "Show connections";
3. Maybe it is a free limitation but almost every time i want to open a table it wants to create a new tab;
4. It doesn't want to reconnect to the server (even when cmd +r) if it lost connection - must close and open server again;
5. I have noticed that 2 different databases which are exact copies (structurally) have different column order so doing simple cmd + c in one DB and then cmd + v will mess up the data as the column order is different.
In case they're not watching this thread, I think they would appreciate your feedback.
These products should have a mandatory feature comparison chart to their competition - it'd speed up the inevitable decline of mediocre competition that relies on gaming google search results for its survival. I back in the day had to download and suffer through half a dozen DB clients that do the same thing slightly differently.
The community edition is updated more often than i would like and sometimes features break but bugs get fixed quickly and they add usefull stuff all the time.
Dont know what i would do if i was stuck with pgAdmin...
pgAdmin is not good.
I still miss SequelPro, as its search and export features where way better then TablePlus’ way.
You have to invalidate / refresh the DB connection so often and this is really an issue when you use Docker in development.
If you do a docker-compose stop and then docker-compose up, your PostgreSQL connection will drop which means you need to reset it in DBeaver manually.
https://eggerapps.at/postico/
as a feature limited to the enterprise version sounds kind of scary.
DBeaver internal formatter is decent and if I want more I can use an external tool.
For example, if you have a table called "catalog_product_flat", would the autocomplete suggest that table when you typed "catprfl"?
> TablePlus is a native application. We are using Swift, Objective-C, C/C++, Perl for OSX, C# for Windows.
SQL Server's free native tool is SSMS (SQL Server Management Studio), which is one of the most powerful SQL clients I've ever used. (despite my carryover reservations with MS products from the 1980s-90s, SQL Server is indisputably an innovative and solid piece of technology -- MS did something right with their database group). One can interact syntactically with the database via pure SQL, but SSMS lets you access the deep corners of the database quickly via a GUI (SQL is a great query language, but many admin/ops tasks are much more easily done via a GUI -- writing SQL every time you want make a simple change is tedious plus nobody remembers the syntax for infrequently used features). Some of the features I use regularly: row/column/covering index creation, linked servers, user management, live query plans, create/alter script generation from existing objects (stored proc, view, index, table, etc.). I've never seen these features exposed in any third party SQL GUI client.
Postgres has a bunch of very powerful features too, and I've never seen these exposed in GUI tools.
Jetbrains' DataGrip comes the closest, but because it needs to support lowest common denominator features across databases, it doesn't expose deep features either.
I wonder if folks are giving up deep feature discovery by using an generic GUI SQL client.
Exception: Oracle SQL Developer. It's native to Oracle but is quite unpleasant to use.
> wonder if one is giving up a lot of power.
That’s an irrational concern. GUI tools also come with SQL consoles where you can do anything that’s possible in the CLI. With the added benefit of results being presented in a nicer way.
Is it though?
So for SQL Server, you can't really see the live query plan (real-time plan + statistics while the query is running) without the GUI. You cannot see the Activity Monitor without the GUI. There are elements that cannot be accessed via pure SQL. 3rd party GUIs generally don't support these features.
Sure, assuming that MSSQL is a foot.
The speed of searching for anything in DataGrip is just so beautiful and amazing for productivity. A big downside is we have run into situations where a SP is cached and is an old version and DataGrip doesn’t notify me that’s the case.
That is a weakness of SSMS, and I've no good answers.
For stuff like SQL formatting though, the free ApexSQL Refactor [1] has been a godsend for me. I write a lot of complex analytic queries and having the ability to tidy up statements as I'm writing the query is amazing.
[1] https://www.apexsql.com/sql-tools-refactor.aspx
It is clumsy and painful, and I will most often just query the sys schema to search for objects, but GUI search is there.
SSMS, unfortunately, is missing a ton of features that 3rd-party clients have mastered -- instant search/filter through query results, quick aggregating of numeric results (min max, sum, avg, sd, etc), sorting on any column, exporting to multiple formats, filtering of schema objects, charts from query results -- just off the top of my head. They also enable many tasks via GUI like creating/editing table schemas, importing bulk data, pre-query variable substitution, etc.
SSMS is free, and should be installed whenever one needs to interface with SQL Server, but good 3rd party clients are generally better at 90+% of common tasks, while SSMS only needs to be used for a handful of specific features that it does very well.
> SSMS, unfortunately, is missing a ton of features that 3rd-party clients have mastered -- instant search/filter through query results, quick aggregating of numeric results (min max, sum, avg, sd, etc), sorting on any column, exporting to multiple formats, filtering of schema objects, charts from query results -- just off the top of my head. They also enable many tasks via GUI like creating/editing table schemas, importing bulk data, pre-query variable substitution, etc.
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True, those are fair points. It does depend on one's use case. Instant search/filter/sort through query results is a useful one that seems to be an omission on SSMS's part.
Quick aggregation and charting are nice to haves, but I would typically do these in Jupyter or Tableau (or Excel if it's a small dataset). These are not features most people would miss if they weren't in their SQL client. Pre-query variable substitution is a great idea, though in SSMS one can use DECLARE @var in many instances (not all) -- it's also not widely supported in 3rd party clients except for more advanced ones like DataGrip.
SSMS does have a pretty comprehensive GUI for creates/edits of schemas. Bulk data ingest can be done in multiple ways (CSV import GUI, bacpacs/dacpacs, backup/restores or using the bcp CLI that comes with SSMS) -- also bulk ingest is not a common feature in 3rd party GUIs.
Side note: for really large data ingests from Parquet etc. I write my own ETL in C# which uses the SqlBulkCopy class (or "turbodbc" in Python) for fast ETL. No GUI client I know can do this.
Your response lists what other clients do better than SSMS, which to me is a different question, so my reply was more in response to this question. I agree that those clients have features that SSMS does not or is weak at. I also think a handful of those features are nice to have but not really something I would expect from a SQL client so I'm neutral about them. That's all.
I believe the two questions lead to separate discussions (both of which I'm happy to engage in), and are non mutually exclusive. Other clients can have all these other nice features which SSMS doesn't, but that does not imply that that there's not still a tradeoff when it comes to their lack of native support for a database's deep features.
https://coinmarket01.blogspot.com/2020/04/what-is-iq-option-...
You might want to report it on GitHub as they seemed quite responsive the last time I reported an issue.
However, SQLPal only supports Oracle.
https://coinmarket01.blogspot.com/2020/04/bitcoin-vs-ethereu...
Includes MongoDB in the list.
DynamoDB is great at its one killer feature of supporting arbitrarily huge tables without you having to worry about any details. For everything else, it's just kind of adequate, considering the constraint of needing to support multi-Terabyte tables. It lacks a huge number of features that all RDBMSes have that would admittedly be impossible or not make sense on huge tables. Thus, it doesn't make much sense to try to access it from a RDBMS GUI.
The AWS Console provides all of the GUI that really makes sense for it, plus the CLI tools and API.
I used DataGrip after SequelPro stopped updating to support MySQL 8 and apparently it's feature rich but got annoyed how it's bloated and takes half a minute to launch.
I still prefer SequelPro for it's layout and UI but finally dropped it in favor of TablePlus as now it seems close enough to that usability.
Also of note is that the author is really responsive and friendly on GitHub who corrected some minor UI issues pretty quickly when I reported.