About once a year, I unsuccessfully quest for a FOSS replacement for Filemaker Pro. Specifically, I’m on the hunt for a solution that:

  1. Lets me create a variety of graphical ‘layouts’ of fields positioned on a page to display different segments of the data.
  2. Can search the data from those same layouts, by entering text into various fields (eg, ‘Sanderson’ in author, ‘< 1/1/2015’ in date.

This is largely for personal sized datasets: I only need to handle small (several thousand entries, all just text based) data collections. Basically, small enough that it could in principle be handled using a Libreoffice Calc spreadsheet and applying filters - I’d just like something more friendly.

Several users will use my databases (locally, no need for online hosting). It will be rare that multiple users try to access it simultaneously, so its ok if only one person can open at a time. Macros and relational field structures would be a bonus but not necessary.

I’ve tried a bunch of solutions. The closest are:

  1. Libreoffice Base. Layouts can’t be used to both enter and search data. Creating new search queries is overly arduous.
  2. Kexi. Similar to Base.
  3. Symphytum. Great, except the search is much too limited (no field specific search)

Any other suggestions?

    • sprite14aOPEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Thank you - this is a great list and includes several of the alternatives I’ve tried. I think the comments highlight the current ‘gap in the market’.

      • Many products are dauntingly complex to get started with compared to Filemaker. For example for the top replacement, DBeaver, the comment is “This is certainly a complex database tool, but not a simple alternative to Filemaker”. ]

      • Many of the possibilities are freemium. I don’t trust freemium products, as they have a habit of eventually eliminating or eviscerating the free tier. (Short rant: the truth is, and I realize this is probably the wrong thing to say in a FOSS community, I actually don’t really mind paying for software if its a once off payment for something that I may enjoy using for years. What I dislike is the subscription model, where I’m locked in to a massive lifetime cost for software, and forced to update software regularly. Forced updates rarely bring features I want, and often bring incompatibility with old files, further locking me in to the subscription software.)

      • Many products require running a webserver - eg NuBuilder, which looks good, but the setup guide is overwhelming (https://github.com/nuBuilder/nuBuilder-4.5/wiki/nuBuilder-Installation-Guide) as it means I need to learn how to host the database on a webserver.