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Context
The bar for customer-facing software has become high. A smooth user experience for customers is top priority to onboard and retain customers as well as to grow your business. Stacker is tackling this problem by allowing companies to quickly and flexibly set up customer-facing software and internal tools.
If you’re not aware, Stacker is a platform that allows you to build custom web apps without any coding knowledge. It’s a great way to get software off the ground.
In this blog, we explore how you can continue to use Stacker AND connect it to your database (including, but not limited to, Postgres) using Bracket.
The Problem
The problem is that Stacker is now gaining a technical audience as well as larger companies as users. Stacker’s no-code focus is why the tool is built on top of products like Google Sheets and Airtable. These spreadsheet tools are good for holding small amounts of data and are friendly for non-technical users, but as an actual store of data have severe limitations such as:
- Poor scalability
- Expensive and slow as # of rows increase
- Isolated from the rest of your tech stack
Stacker does have a Postgres connector, but it has it’s limitations.
1. You can only use it on the enterprise plan, so needless to say it’ll get pricey
2. You can only import data into Airtable from Postgres. If you want to sync data from Airtable to Postgres, that currently isn’t possible
3. Join logic isn’t supported. If you want to pull data from an existing table in Postgres that should be fine. But if you want to query your data to pull into Google Sheets or Airtable, it seems that that isn’t available with Stacker today either
4. The only database Stacker supports is Postgres. If you use Firebase, MongoDB, Snowflake, MySQL or literally anything else then you’re out of luck.
Bracket
Bracket syncs Airtable & Google Sheets with your database or data warehouse in either direction. With automatic 2-way syncs between these tools, Bracket enables business teams to read & write to their database without ever leaving their spreadsheet tool. Here’s how Stacker customers are using us today:
- Sync data from MongoDB, Firebase, etc. to Airtable so that business teams can have a read-only view of data that they usually cannot access
- Spin up new instances in your Postgres based on the data already living in the Google Sheets that your Stacker app is built on
- Turn Airtable or Google sheets into a UI for your database. Individuals who aren’t given access to the backend database now have a way to get primary contact with data that is relevant to them while still keeping controls on protection and permissions over data.
For small businesses, this allows you to continue to use Stacker while keeping your data in an actual database built for scale, efficiency, and cost minimization.
For tech companies, this prevents data in Stacker from staying siloed. A company that operates on a standard tech stack should have a source-of-truth for data. It also allows business teams to build internal tools with Stacker that interact with your backend data stores, without needing engineers to build & maintain internal tooling. It’s giving full power to the non-technical end users to own their tooling while still giving engineers control over permissions.
Want to get your database syncing with Stacker? Get started here.
