Bika is the middle ground between a fast/loose spreadsheet and a traditional database.

This is great if you want to make strict rock solid sheets/databases that aren't always one copy/paste or cat paw away from a disaster, accidental deletion of functions etc. You can trust that functions and data types used are consistent for each column.

It is nicely organised and the views management is intuitive and clean, making it easy to hide certain columns in views where they are not needed to be referenced or edited.

I can understand how this product didn't immediately jive with some users, as the onboarding was a bit strange - at least for me.

I would recommend going straight to creating a new database/sheet first and checking out the features there, before exploring the other features. This is a great product for the databases alone in my opinion.

The fact that the founder issued license tiers based on previous license tiers purchase for AITable (while those buyers kept access to AITable too) is a great sign that the team has a lot of integrity. I was not a buyer of AITable, but it's a great indicator.

They didn't do the ol 'oh it's a new product we spent the LTD funds on developing - but dw you can keep access to the old version that we won't update ever again'.

I like that they made the difficult choice in order to be great, rebuilding from scratch based on superior architecture (in terms of what they are trying to achieve), rather than the easy choice of continuing with the inferior architecture and having the greatness they are envisioning forever out of reach.

Though as a result, it's quite an early product and there are some bugs. That said, they are refining and adding features fast. I see a lot of new 'coming soon' features being added in the UI. The foundation of this project seems very solid. So a few minor bugs here and there is not a big deal imo, seeing that those will be ironed out. I mostly care that the foundation itself is solid and it is actively being updated/refined by a talented team with a great direction.

You can get general support via their community forum, as well as see update activity: https://community.bika.ai

Their support is quick at least via the forum, you can check for yourself.

So I think this tool is going to shape up to a real solid workhorse based on their development speed, replacing Google sheets and similar for practically all of my cases. While being strict with the data enough to be dependable to use with critical data. Allowing huge datasets also, covering more use cases, while having inbuilt automation capabilities. It's clean, well structured and nicely organised with easy role management.

I do hope that they add single variables for databases, that live outside of the rows/columns of the database (or external databases) itself though, for use/reference in functions.

Overall, I am very optimistic about Bika.