Base Captain and the alternatives
What businesses use today to run their work, and how Base Captain compares with each: the other side's strengths, its own prices and the day we checked them.
Spreadsheets and chat groups
Free and familiar. But nobody knows which copy is current, anyone can change anything, and steps get lost in the chat.
A spreadsheet is where most businesses start, and Base Captain starts from it too: give it your spreadsheet, and each sheet becomes a list in your base, each row a record, and a column that names rows of another sheet links the two. Your team then works in one place, with no copies to keep in step.
Moving from spreadsheetsSoftware made for one kind of business
Ready on the first day, and made for how most businesses of that kind work. When yours works in another way, you wait for the vendor or find a way around the software.
If software made for one kind of business fits the way you work, keep it. Base Captain is for the business whose steps, details and rules are its own, and change more often than a vendor updates its software.
App builders such as Airtable
Flexible, if someone on your team has the time to build the app and look after it.
- Airtable A flexible database your team shapes into its own tool, priced per editor.
- Softr Portals and internal tools on your data, wherever it lives, priced by builders and app users.
- Noloco Portals for teams and their clients with fine-grained permissions, priced by team seats.
- Knack A database with an app builder on top and no charge per user, priced by records.
- Glide Apps and agents from spreadsheets, for the desktop and the phone, priced by credits.
- Quickbase A governed platform for company apps, and Pave for smaller teams, priced per user or per plan.
- Notion A workspace of docs, pages and databases your team arranges itself, priced per user.
- monday.com Boards for a team’s work, with many views, automations and AI, priced per seat.
Code generators such as Lovable and Base44
An app in minutes, made of code. When it needs a change or breaks, you need someone who can read and fix that code.
Hiring a developer
Exactly what you asked for, at a developer's price, and every later change is another invoice and another wait.
A developer is the right call for a product you sell or a system nobody else has. For the software your business runs on, Base Captain makes the changes instantly when you ask, without an invoice or a wait for each one.
Already on Airtable, Notion or monday.com?
Download each table, database or board as a CSV or Excel file, put them in one spreadsheet, and the assistant builds the lists and the links between them, with your records in them.