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Stackby vs. Zoho Tables Which is the better solution for your business?
Stackby is one of the latest tools to jump on the spreadsheet-database hybrid bandwagon. It promises to help businesses and teams manage data, automate work, and streamline workflows. In this article, we'll discuss its features and drawbacks and suggest a better alternative.
Get StartedWhat is Stackby?
Stackby is an online no-code database with a spreadsheet interface that helps businesses organize diverse data, create custom solutions, centralize work, and automate workflows. It's a straightforward tool to create end-to-end business processes across departments.
Stackby features
Versatile data views
Stackby offers several views like grid, kanban, gallery, calendar, form, list, and timeline to visualize data. It helps in breaking down large volumes of data into easily digestible formats. For example, the gallery view can display creatives, timeline can show a linear view of events, and kanban cards can show the status of tasks.
Workflow automation
Users can set rules to trigger desired actions when a row is created, updated, or enters a view; a form is submitted; or a webhook is received. They help in removing manual effort spent on repetitive tasks.
Custom reporting
Users can create real-time dashboards for their data, with charts, pivots, summaries, goal trackers, and map views. These help in analyzing patterns, gaining insights, and making data-backed decisions.
Stackby drawbacks
Steep learning curve
Despite Stackby's long list of offerings, it remains a challenge for new users to get started with the product. The lack of AI assistance in guiding users to build stacks makes it harder for them to adapt to the product. Their only options are migrating data, using one of their templates, or building solutions from scratch.
Here are some verified reviews from G2:
If you are not familiar with spreadsheet apps like Airtable, Workiom or Google Sheets, then you will have a bigger learning curve ahead of you. They do have tutorial videos, which is great but to fully understand creating the layout and structure, it is time-consuming but with any business you get out of it what you put into it, so I hope you will take the time to learn how to build different views for your data it is an important skill to learn with this type of tool.
Missing videos, onboarding or any related LMS feature that could help us to better understand how we can actually pull out data from sources via API. It has a learning curve and at the first try, it took me almost a week to set up a basic table where I could inject data from Google Analytics.
Steep pricing
Stackby offers five pricing tiers: Free, Economy, Business, Pro, and Enterprise. The catch lies in paid upgrades, also known as "powerups". These powerups include basic features like importing files from Excel and Google Sheets, view-level sharing, table permissions, and data export. They're only available under the $20 user/month/workspace Business plan, which doesn't include the additional charges for the powerups.
$6
per seat per month,
$10
per seat per month
$20
per seat per month,
$35
per seat per month
Unintuitive mobile application
Stackby's web version and mobile application are worlds apart. The mobile app has a rudimentary interface and lacks even basic views like kanban and calendar. As a result, teams have to depend on the web version to perform operations, which defeats the purpose of having a mobile application in the first place.
Here's a verified review from G2:
While sometimes the mobile app is functional but lacks the smoothness and full capability of the desktop version. Users often complain that it’s clunky or not ideal for managing large or complex stacks on the go
Introducing a better alternative to Stackby
Zoho Tables is a spreadsheet-database hybrid that helps individuals and businesses organize data, automate processes, and streamline workflows with zero coding. It provides all the features that Stackby offers, such as creating relational databases, data visualization, custom reporting, and workflow automation. Additionally, it overcomes Stackby's shortcomings by offering features like:
Smart AI assistant
Unlike Stackby, users can get started with Zoho Tables in seconds with just an AI prompt. Zia, Zoho's AI assistant, understands user prompts, suggests relevant tables, and can create an entire base with sample data and linked tables. The time spent on setting up bases with data relationships is limited so users can realize the value of the product faster.
$4
user/month when billed annually.
Unlike Stackby, users don't need to pay extra for accessing basic features.
Top-notch mobile app
Zoho Tables' mobile app has all the features of the web app plus mobile-specific features, like base creation using Siri, uploading voice attachments, watching video attachments in picture-in-picture mode, scanning tabular data and converting them into tables, and more. The mobile app is a complete solution on its own that users can access on the go.
Try Zoho Tables today
Despite all the helpful features that Stackby offers, it stops short when it comes to user-friendliness, mobile connectivity, and AI. Zoho Tables bridges this gap and helps individuals and businesses create custom solutions easily.
Sign up today