Best NocoDB Alternatives in 2026: 12 Tools for Teams Rethinking the Licence

Updated September 2026

The best NocoDB alternatives in 2026 are Baserow, Teable, and Grist if what you want back is an OSI-approved open-source licence, Airtable and SmartSuite if the real problem was owning a server, Directus, Retool, Budibase, and Appsmith if the point was pointing at a database you already run, and Knack or Caspio if people outside your company need logins. Every tool below was evaluated on licence terms, self-hosting rights, external-user access, record ceilings, and real cost at 25 seats, with every price checked against the vendor's own pricing page in September 2026.

Most people reading this arrived for one reason. On 9 January 2026, from v0.301.0 onward, NocoDB moved from AGPL-3.0 to the Sustainable Use License, a fair-code, source-available licence, per NocoDB's own licensing documentation. The honest read before you shortlist anything: if you run NocoDB as internal ops tooling, nothing has broken. You still get the full source, you can still self-host without restriction, and you can still modify it for internal use at any company size. The teams that need to act are agencies, MSPs, and product companies who hand NocoDB access to their own customers. This guide sorts the alternatives by which situation you are in, and it is honest about the third option, which is staying put. If you are shopping the whole category, start with the best no-code database software guide.

Key Facts

• NocoDB relicensed from AGPL-3.0 to the Sustainable Use License on 9 January 2026, from v0.301.0, with self-hosting and internal use still permitted regardless of organization size, per NocoDB's self-hosting licence page.
• 55% of organizations now cite avoiding vendor lock-in as a reason for choosing open source, up from 33% a year earlier and roughly 63% across Europe and the UK, while 98% increased or maintained open-source usage, per the 2026 OpenLogic State of Open Source Report.
• Source-available licences such as the BSL and SSPL remain statistically rare even as prominent projects adopt them, while permissive licences held roughly 73% share in 2025, per RedMonk's March 2026 licensing analysis.
• PostgreSQL is the most-used database in the industry at 55.6% of all respondents and 58.2% of professional developers, ahead of MySQL at 40.5%, per the 2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey.
• The low-code development technologies market is forecast to reach $44.5 billion in 2026, growing at roughly 19% a year, per Gartner's forecast as reported by InfoWorld.

Read the first two together and you have the 2026 problem. Lock-in avoidance is the fastest-growing reason teams pick open source, and the tools those teams picked are the ones changing their licences.

What Actually Changed in January 2026

Get this precise before you spend a quarter migrating. "NocoDB went closed source" is not accurate, and neither is waving it away.

The Sustainable Use License is a source-available licence in the fair-code family. The code stays public, the repository stays readable, and you can still run it. What it adds is a restriction on commercial redistribution: the repository's own licence file limits use and modification to your own internal business purposes or to non-commercial and personal use, and lets you pass the software on to others only free of charge and for non-commercial purposes.

Two details matter more than the headline. First, the restriction is about who touches the software, not how big you are: no revenue threshold, no employee count, so an internal tool at a 4,000-person company is fine. Second, the licence is not unique to NocoDB, and that is the part most roundups get wrong. Say you migrate to Directus to escape this. Directus now ships under the Monospace Sustainable Core License, MSCL-1.0-GPL, copyright 2026 Monospace Inc., per the licence text on Directus's own site. Same family of move, same year, and picking it as an escape route lands you in the same conversation with your legal team twelve months later.

Who Is Actually Affected

Three groups, and only one has a real problem.

That last row is the quiet one. Plenty of procurement policies name OSI approval rather than "source available", and the SUL is not OSI approved. If your tender documents say the words, this is a compliance issue no matter how internal the usage is.

Quick Comparison Table

Licence Comparison Table

This is the table worth bookmarking, because it is the thing that changed and the thing most listicles have not updated. Every licence below was read from the vendor's own repository or licence page in September 2026.

Two things to take from that table. NocoDB's move is real but narrow, and Baserow's MIT Expat edition is the most permissive licence on the list, which is why it heads the shortlist for anyone who wants the old posture back. The other side of the same coin: Directus is not the escape hatch a 2024-vintage article would have told you it was. The best Baserow alternatives guide runs the same exercise in reverse.

Why Teams Leave NocoDB

The licence is one reason. These are the others, and each has a different right answer.

Notice how few of those are about the licence. That ratio holds in real migration conversations too.

Sizing and Persona Table

1. Baserow - the closest thing to the licence NocoDB used to have

If your reason for leaving is the licence and only the licence, Baserow is the shortest hop with the cleanest answer. The Baserow Open Source Edition is MIT Expat, verified in the repository's own licence file, which is about as permissive as licensing gets: use it, modify it, host it for customers, sell it inside something else. The premium/ and enterprise/ directories carry separate non-MIT licences and the docs are CC BY-SA 4.0, so the honest phrasing is "the open-source edition is MIT" rather than "Baserow is MIT".

Product-wise it is the same shape: grids, views, linked tables, forms, a growing automation builder, and a self-hosted deployment you already know how to run. What it does not do is NocoDB's signature trick. Baserow stores records in its own schema rather than sitting on a Postgres or MySQL database you already own, so if you chose NocoDB because engineering kept control of the schema, this is a step sideways. Better licence, worse fit for database-first teams. The Airtable versus Baserow comparison covers the managed side of the same decision.

Pricing: Free with 3,000 rows per workspace, 2 GB storage, and 2,000 automation credits. Premium is $10 per user per month billed yearly, $12 billed monthly, with 50,000 rows per workspace, 20 GB, and 100,000 automation credits. Advanced is $18 billed yearly, $22 billed monthly, with 250,000 rows and 100 GB. Enterprise is on request with 1,000,000 rows and unlimited external app users, per Baserow's pricing page.

Best for: Teams of 5 to 150 whose exit reason is the licence itself, and who do not depend on NocoDB pointing at an external database.

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2. Teable - still AGPL-3.0, with real Postgres tables underneath

Teable answers both halves of the question at once. Its core applications are still licensed under AGPL-3.0, exactly the licence NocoDB left, verified in the repository's licence file in September 2026, with the packages/ directory under MIT. Brand assets are carved out of the grant under AGPL section 7(e), which is normal and does not affect ordinary use. If your objection is "we chose AGPL deliberately and we want it back", this is the direct swap.

The second half is architectural. Teable stores records as genuine Postgres tables rather than rows in a proprietary blob, so analysts can point BI tools straight at the database and engineers can write real SQL against it. That is closer to NocoDB's philosophy than anything else here, with the difference that Teable owns the database rather than connecting to yours. The caveats are honest ones: it is the youngest product on this list, the integration catalogue is thin, and the company moved domains in 2026, with teable.io now redirecting to teable.ai and the pricing changing at the same time.

Pricing: Free with 1,000 rows and 1 GB. Pro is $13 per seat per month billed yearly, with 250,000 rows and 10 GB. Business is $20 per seat per month billed yearly, with 1,000,000 rows and 100 GB, per Teable's pricing page. The self-hosted edition follows the repository licence rather than a subscription.

Best for: Technical teams of 3 to 50 who want AGPL-3.0 back and who like the idea of their records being ordinary Postgres rows.

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3. Grist - Apache 2.0, Python formulas, and permissions that hold up

Grist is the pick when the licence matters and so does governance. Grist Core is Apache 2.0, verified in the repository's licence file, which is permissive with no copyleft and no fair-code clause. For a public-sector buyer or a procurement team that names OSI approval in the tender, that is often the end of the evaluation.

What you get on top of the licence is a different class of logic. Formulas are Python, not an expression language, so an analyst writes a real function with branching and lookups instead of nesting six IFs. Access rules work at row and column level and key off user attributes, so "regional managers see only their region's rows, and nobody outside finance sees the salary column" is a rule you configure rather than a workaround you design around. NocoDB puts row-level security on its Scale tier; Grist treats it as core. The trade is polish and ecosystem: fewer one-click integrations, a plainer grid, a smaller template library.

Pricing: Free with 5,000 records per document. Pro is $8 per user per month billed annually, $10 billed monthly. Business is $24 per user per month billed annually, $30 billed monthly, with a 5-user minimum and 150,000 records per document. The Community Edition is free and open source to self-host, while managed self-hosted plans run $24 to $30 per user per month, per Grist's pricing page.

Best for: Analysts, finance teams, and regulated or public-sector organizations of 3 to 100 who need permissions and formulas that survive a review.

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4. Directus - reads your existing database, but read the licence first

Directus most closely reproduces what NocoDB actually does. Point it at a Postgres, MySQL, SQL Server, or SQLite database, let it introspect the schema, and you get an admin interface, a REST and GraphQL API, role-based permissions, and a flow builder on top of tables your engineers still own. No proprietary store, no import step, no second copy of the truth.

And it has the same licence story you are trying to leave. Directus now ships under the Monospace Sustainable Core License, MSCL-1.0-GPL, copyright 2026 Monospace Inc. It permits internal use, education, research, and professional-services deployment, and excludes Competing Use, meaning offering Directus itself as a paid competing service. There is a sweetener NocoDB does not offer: an Open Innovation Grant gives free commercial use to organizations under $5M in annual revenue with fewer than 50 employees, and every version converts to GPL-3.0 four years after release. Whether that beats the SUL depends on which restriction bites you. For a 300-person company running an internal tool, both licences are fine. For an agency, neither is.

Pricing: Self-hosted instances run on the core tier at $0 without a licence key. Plus is listed at $50 per seat per month. Team is $499 per month billed annually, $599 billed monthly. The Open Innovation Grant covers free commercial use below $5M annual revenue and 50 employees, per Directus's pricing and licensing overview.

Best for: Engineering-led teams of 5 to 200 who want an admin and API layer over a database they already run, and who have read the MSCL and are comfortable with it.

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5. Budibase - GPLv3, and the grid was never the interface

Budibase belongs on the shortlist when the honest answer is that your staff never wanted a spreadsheet. They wanted a screen with four fields and a submit button. Budibase is a low-code internal app builder: drag components onto a canvas, connect Postgres, MySQL, MongoDB, REST APIs, or its built-in database, then use bindings and JavaScript when the visual layer runs out. It self-hosts cleanly and is GPLv3 overall per its own licensing guidelines file, with each package carrying its own licence.

The licence detail that matters for anyone spooked by the SUL: those guidelines state that apps you build with Budibase do not package GPLv3 code, so an internal tool does not pull copyleft obligations into your own product. That is a different posture from a fair-code licence restricting who may use the software. The catch is scope. You are not migrating a database, you are building an application, and a fifteen-table NocoDB workspace does not become a Budibase app in an afternoon.

Pricing: The open-source self-hosted edition is free. Pro is $19 per user per month billed annually, $23 billed monthly. Premium is $49 billed annually, $59 billed monthly. Business is $299 billed annually, $359 billed monthly. Add-ons run $5 per end user per month and $50 per creator per month, per Budibase's pricing page.

Best for: Teams of 10 to 300 with at least one technical builder, where the real gap was the interface rather than the database.

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6. Appsmith - Apache 2.0, with no fair-code clause to read

Appsmith is Budibase's category with a different licence and a different centre of gravity. The Community Edition is Apache 2.0, verified in the repository's licence file, which is permissive, OSI approved, and carries none of the usage restrictions that sent you looking. If your legal team has been burned twice by licence changes and wants something boring, Apache 2.0 is the boring answer.

Functionally you get a drag-and-drop canvas over any data source, with JavaScript available everywhere a value can go and SQL written directly against connected databases. It leans more developer-facing than Budibase: Git-backed app versioning is first-class, so internal tools live in the same review workflow as the rest of your code. The trade is the one Budibase makes too. This replaces the interface, not the spreadsheet, and it needs someone who can write a query. Pair it with your existing Postgres and you have rebuilt what NocoDB gave you, under a licence nobody has to interpret.

Pricing: The self-hosted Community Edition is free. Cloud is free for up to 5 users with 5 workspaces and 3 Git repositories. Business is $15 per user per month, billed monthly, for up to 99 users. Enterprise starts at $2,500 per month for 100 users and is typically contracted annually, per Appsmith's pricing page. Appsmith was not on our pre-verified vendor sheet, so these figures were read off the vendor's own page in September 2026.

Best for: Engineering-supported teams of 20 to 1,000 who want a permissive licence and internal tools that live in Git.

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7. Retool - the commercial answer to "just point it at our database"

Retool is here for teams whose conclusion after all this is that they never wanted to be in the licence-reading business. It is proprietary, which sounds like the wrong direction until you notice that a proprietary tool cannot relicense out from under you: the subscription agreement is the whole relationship, and it is the same relationship you already have with your payroll provider.

What Retool sells is speed. Connect a database or an API, drag in a table and a form, wire them with a query, and you have a working internal tool in an afternoon. Its component library is the deepest in this class, and it handles the awkward middle ground where a tool needs to read from Postgres, write to Stripe, and post to Slack in one action. Model the pricing carefully before you commit: standard users and end users are billed separately at very different rates, so a tool with 12 builders and 600 viewers costs something quite different from one with 600 builders.

Pricing: There is a free plan. Team is $10 per standard user per month with end users at $5 per user per month. Business is $50 per standard user per month with end users at $15 per user per month. End-user volume tiers drop to $8 per month between 51 and 250 users and $4 per month above 500. Additional workflow runs are $75 per 5,000 runs per month. Retool publishes these as per-month rates, per Retool's pricing page.

Best for: Companies of 20 to 2,000 who want the internal-tool outcome, have a budget line for it, and are done evaluating licences.

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8. Airtable - when the real problem was owning a server

Plenty of teams discover part-way through this evaluation that the licence was not the pain. The pain was that whoever set up the Docker instance left eighteen months ago, the version is four releases behind, and the licence change is the first time anyone has looked at it since. If that describes you, the answer is a managed product, and Airtable is the default for a reason.

It has the largest template, extension, and integration catalogue in the category by a wide margin, the deepest visual automation builder in the spreadsheet-database class, a scripting extension for when that builder runs out, and Interfaces for putting an app-like layer over a base without code. The costs are the two you would expect. Records are capped hard per base at every self-serve tier, and every editor is a paid seat, so the 25-person ops team you ran for nothing on your own hardware becomes a five-figure annual line item. Cloud only, so residency is Airtable's decision. The best Airtable alternatives guide runs this comparison from the other direction.

Pricing: Free with 1,000 records per base, 1 GB of attachments, and 100 automation runs. Team is $20 per seat per month billed annually, with 50,000 records per base, 20 GB, and 25,000 runs. Business is $45 per seat per month billed annually, with 125,000 records and 100,000 runs. Enterprise Scale is custom, with 500,000 records per base. Airtable bills every user who has edit permission on at least one base in the workspace, while commenters and read-only users are not billed, per Airtable's pricing page.

Best for: Teams of 5 to 100 who want the maintenance burden to disappear and can absorb per-seat pricing.

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9. SmartSuite - managed, with the process built in rather than assembled

SmartSuite is the managed pick when what NocoDB could not hold together was a process rather than a dataset. Where Airtable hands you a flexible canvas, SmartSuite ships with opinions: status workflows, approval steps, checklists, time tracking, comments pinned to records, and a permission model that assumes different roles should see different things. That constraint is the product. A 60-person operation running a fully flexible tool tends to end up with four incompatible readings of the same process, and SmartSuite pushes you toward one.

Conceptually the switch is straightforward, since the grid, view, and linked-record model feels familiar the first afternoon. Two numbers to check before you commit. There is a 3-billable-user minimum, so a two-person team is priced out of the entry tier by design. And the Team plan caps at 5,000 records per solution, materially lower than Airtable's 50,000 per base at a comparable price, so compare tiers rather than logos. The Airtable versus SmartSuite comparison works through that trade, and the best SmartSuite alternatives guide covers the exits.

Pricing: Team is $15 per seat per month billed annually, $20 billed monthly, with a 3-billable-user minimum and 5,000 records per solution. Professional is $32 per seat per month billed annually, $36 billed monthly, with a 5-user minimum and 100,000 records per solution, per SmartSuite's pricing page.

Best for: Operations teams of 20 to 200 who want the process enforced by the tool rather than by a wiki page nobody reads.

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10. Notion - when the missing piece was documents, not rows

Notion earns a place here for a specific and common case: the NocoDB workspace was never really a database. It was a client list, a project tracker, and a content calendar that mostly needed to sit next to the notes, briefs, and SOPs describing them. Notion's databases are ordinary blocks inside pages, so a record opens into a full document, and that document lives in the wiki your team already opens every morning.

Be clear-eyed about the trade, because this is where roundups usually oversell. Notion is a weak database once you push it. Relations and rollups work but get slow and awkward at scale, formulas are capable but not a programming language, there is no self-hosting, and there is nothing resembling row-level security by user attribute. If your instance is the operational backbone of a business process, Notion is a downgrade wearing a nicer interface. If it is a structured list people mostly read, it is an upgrade. The best Notion alternatives guide is the honest counterweight.

Pricing: There is a free personal plan. Plus is $10 per member per month billed annually and Business is $20 per member per month billed annually, per Notion's pricing page. Notion's page advertises savings on yearly billing, so the monthly rates are higher than these figures.

Best for: Teams of 2 to 100 whose data is more reference than transaction, and who want one tool instead of a database plus a wiki.

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11. Knack - customer logins without a per-user bill

Knack is the first of two entries aimed at the group the licence change actually affects: teams whose external customers, members, or vendors log in to the thing you built. That is precisely what the Sustainable Use License restricts for NocoDB, and Knack is built for it. You model your data, build forms and views, define role-based rules for who sees which rows, and issue real logins to people outside your company.

The pricing model is why it fits. Knack is priced per account, not per user, and its pricing page leads with unlimited users as the headline. Read that carefully, because there is a real trap in it: unlimited end users is not unlimited builders. Starter includes exactly one shared builder seat alongside those unlimited end-user logins, so two people who both want to edit the app need Pro. Say both halves of that sentence to your finance lead before you budget. A promotional 66% discount on the first three months for new monthly customers is a promotion, not the price. The best Knack alternatives guide covers the rest of the category.

Pricing: Starter is $49 per month billed annually, $59 billed monthly, with 20,000 records, 3 apps, and 1 shared builder. Pro is $110 per month billed annually, $130 billed monthly, with 50,000 records and unlimited apps and builders. Corporate is $250 per month billed annually, $300 billed monthly, with 125,000 to 2.5 million records. Enterprise is contact-for-pricing. End-user logins are unlimited on every plan, per Knack's pricing page.

Best for: Teams of any size whose application serves people outside the company, especially where the user count would make per-seat pricing absurd.

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12. Caspio - external-facing portals with compliance behind them

Caspio is the enterprise end of the same idea, on this list for one specific reader: the organization that was running NocoDB behind a customer or member login and now needs a platform that explicitly permits it, with an audit trail to match. It is priced per account with unlimited application end-users, and carries the compliance posture healthcare, government, and financial-services buyers ask for before they sign anything.

What you pay for is not features per row. It is the ability to build a database-backed application, expose it to thousands of external users, and hand your compliance team a document when they ask how it works. The entry price reflects that: Team is an order of magnitude above the grid tools, and app authors are capped at 5 on that tier while end users are not capped at all. A two-person agency that just needs client logins is on the wrong shelf here, and Knack is the right one. A 400-person organization with a regulator is on exactly the right one. The best Caspio alternatives guide compares the category.

Pricing: Team is $270 per month billed annually, $300 billed monthly, with 5 app authors, unlimited application end-users, and 250,000 records. Business is $540 per month billed annually, $600 billed monthly, with unlimited authors and 1 million records, per Caspio's pricing page.

Best for: Regulated organizations of 50 to 5,000 who need external-facing applications with compliance evidence attached.

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Self-Hosted vs Cloud

You made this call once when you chose NocoDB. The licence change is a good excuse to make it again on purpose rather than by inertia.

The row people skip is licence risk, and 2026 made it concrete. Self-hosting protects you from price rises, not from terms changes: NocoDB and Directus both altered the deal for future versions this year while every existing binary kept working. The mitigation is not to avoid open source. It is to pick a permissive licence (MIT, Apache 2.0) where a future relicensing cannot claw back what you already have, to know which version you are pinned to, and to make sure a named person owns the upgrade schedule.

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Migration Effort

Effort assumes one NocoDB workspace of moderate size, moved by someone who knows the data.

There is a shortcut worth knowing. If your instance was already pointed at an external Postgres or MySQL database rather than using NocoDB's internal store, then Directus, Retool, Budibase, and Appsmith involve no data migration at all. You swap the interface and the data never moves. Check which mode you were running in before you plan anything.

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When NocoDB Is Still the Right Answer

Plenty of teams work through this and correctly decide to stay. That is a real outcome, not a cop-out, and the switching costs are not theoretical.

Stay if your usage is internal. The licence permits self-hosting without restriction, modification for internal use, and internal usage regardless of organization size, so if nobody outside your company logs in, nothing you are doing is restricted. The self-hosted Community edition remains free forever with unlimited records and storage and all five user roles, which no cloud tier here comes close to matching on cost. A 60-person ops team on their own server pays infrastructure plus a maintainer's attention, very often less than $20 per seat per month elsewhere.

Stay if the differentiator is what you need. NocoDB connecting to a Postgres, MySQL, SQL Server, or SQLite database you already run is hard to replace with a grid tool, because Baserow, Airtable, SmartSuite, and Notion all own their own store. Only Directus, Retool, Budibase, and Appsmith reproduce the pattern, and three are interface builders rather than spreadsheets while the fourth has its own source-available licence. One thing to check first: NocoDB's cloud Plus tier includes no external database connections, so moving to NocoDB Cloud to escape maintenance means the Business tier and its 10 connections, not Plus.

Where NocoDB runs out is the resale and external-access case, procurement rules naming OSI approval, and row-level security, which sits on the Scale tier at $45 per user per month billed annually with a 3-seat minimum. Those are licensing and packaging decisions, not roadmap gaps you can wait out. Everything else on the "why we might leave" list has a cheaper fix than a migration, and the no-code database buyer guide walks the criteria in order.

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How to Choose: Decision Framework

Use this once you are down to two or three candidates, not before.

Three mistakes account for most bad picks here. Migrating over a licence clause that does not apply to you, which is the majority of cases this year. Choosing Directus as the escape from a source-available licence, which swaps the SUL for the MSCL. And moving to another self-hosted tool without naming who owns patching, which reproduces the problem you are leaving with a fresher logo. If you land on a managed grid tool, the best Airtable alternatives and project management software guides cover what comes next.

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What to Do Next

Start with a five-minute check rather than a shortlist. Open your instance and answer two questions: what version are you on, and does anyone outside your company have a login. If everyone with access is on your payroll, you have no licensing problem, and the right next move is to schedule the upgrade you have been postponing and get on with your quarter.

If the answer to the second question is yes, pick two finalists from the decision framework and test them the same way. Export your largest table, load it into both, then rebuild your three most-used views and your single most important automation on top of it. Give yourself an afternoon each and watch what happens to link fields, formulas, date handling, and file attachments. That tells you what a feature table cannot. And if you find yourself rebuilding something NocoDB was handling perfectly well, that is an answer too: buy the commercial licence, keep the instance, and spend the quarter on something that moves.

Related Resources:

• Best No-Code Database Software in 2026
• Best Baserow Alternatives
• Best Airtable Alternatives
• Best SmartSuite Alternatives
• Best Knack Alternatives
• Best Caspio Alternatives
• Best Notion Alternatives
• Airtable vs Baserow
• Airtable vs SmartSuite
• How to Choose No-Code Database Software