Browse and manage relational data the easy way
Tell us where your customer data is — SQL databases, external CRMs and tools, or elsewhere — and we'll let you manage it at the speed of thought.
👩💻 Built for customer data
Your users table is your most valuable asset. Powerbase lets you do things like hide sensitive data by default, run account deduplication and merging, and build a single customer profile out of the box, with zero configuration.
⚡️ Lightning Fast
Most database tools are slow, taking several seconds to show simple queries. Powerbase's Turbo mode lets you search and query across millions of records in milliseconds.
⛓ Link data from multiple sources, kill silos
Our Connections tool lets you "link" customer data from various sources together. For example, if you connect both your Hubspot and Zendesk accounts, and visit a user profile, Powerbase will show records from both systems alongside each other.
FAQ
What is Powerbase?
The non-technical answer
Powerbase provides a unified way to browse, manage, and interact with data stored across multiple systems - systems like your core user database, your customer CRM, and your no-code tools.
The technology used to power these systems - the Relational Database - is a universal standard, but the interfaces used to browse and manage the data are proprietary, siloed, and incongruous. For example, both Hubspot and Zendesk store important information about your customers, but it's very difficult to see this data in the same place, to see related data, such as their activity within your product, or to merge or sync records between them.
The technical answer
Powerbase is a power tool for relational databases, mixed with a customer data platform. It can do all the things Airtable can, but it can also bring in external data, and connect data from multiple sources. And because it uses Postgres (or whatever database format you prefer) behind the scenes, it has none of the scaling or interoperability limitations of a proprietary tool such as Airtable.
What is a Relational Database?
The Relational Database is probably one of the most important technologies you've never heard of. It underpins almost every digital product you use from Instagram to Youtube. It's kind of like a spreadsheet, but it allows you to "connect" rows across different tables to each other. Up until recently, use of relational databases was reserved to software developers (in order to use one, you had to write code), but a new generation of products have now also made them accessible to a non-technical audience.
What is Airtable?
Airtable is one of the "new generation" of products mentioned above 👆. They were the first company to perfect the "Consumer relational database" (sorry Smartsheet 😬) by building an incredibly well-loved product and teaching people how it could be used, creating a new category and paving the way for others to build for this new class of "professional no-coder".
(As you can tell, we are huge fans and regular users of Airtable, but we also believe the consumer relational database is a category, not a single product, and one which will have many variations and options. At Powerbase we want to expand on many of the concepts Airtable popularized and drive forward the "Consumer Relational Database" as a category.)
Can I build a database from scratch in Powerbase? Or does it only connect to existing databases?
Yes. Powerbase will have a number of "write modes" - one which will allow you to build out your own database from scratch. When it comes to data storage, you'll be able to connect to an existing database, have us create one for you, or connect your cloud provider and spin one up on a server you own.
What Can I use Powerbase For?
The long term goal for Powerbase is to cover the Big Four problems of the software supported business. This will take time, but we're not in any rush. You can find a list of use cases we plan to support here, or browse the full roadmap here.
Is Powerbase available to the public?
Powerbase is currently in closed beta. We launched this website to allow us to begin to tell the world about what we're building, and to communicate with early customers and potential customers. If you think you have a use for Powerbase, please get in touch.
Where is data stored? Is my data safe on Powerbase?
There are multiple levels to how Powerbase works with data. At the entry level, If you wish to use Powerbase purely as a database browsing tool on top of an existing database, we directly transfer data from your database to the end user, without storing any data on our servers. If you want to either enable Turbo Mode, or sync data from an external tool, some data will be stored (safely) on our servers. Over time, we will have self-hosted versions which will allow you to store data on your own servers.
What's "Turbo Mode"
Turbo mode is the name we've given to the feature that makes navigating data in Powerbase lightning fast. As web software gets snappier, people have increasingly come to expect instant response times from their browser-based tools. But existing database browsing tools are generally quite slow to load data, depending on where the data is stored. Turbo Mode in Powerbase uses ElasticSearch to make your data instantly available, even if there are tens or hundreds of millions of records.
What are the existing alternatives to Powerbase?
While we haven't come across any tools approaching this set of problems in the exact same way, there are several "buckets" of tools that do similar things. Within the no-code database space, there's Airtable, Baserow, Basedash, and Nocodb, and in the internal tools space there are products like Retool or Forest Admin.
When can I use Powerbase?
Powerbase is in active development. The quickest way to get access to it is to tell us what you need to use it for. We're looking to expand our early group of beta testers, so if your use case fits and you're open to encountering the odd bug and providing feedback, we'd love to have you.
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