Glide Review

Glide picked the segment Retool won't touch: business users wiring Google Sheets, not engineers wiring Postgres. That's a legitimate moat, not a generational one. Founder David Siegel has run it for eight years, with Y Combinator W19 in the lineage.

Maker runs $25 a month, Team $99, Business $249. The Spreadsheet to App Conversion engine closes ops teams already living in Sheets, and row ceilings scale from 10,000 to 1,000,000 across tiers. Benchmark led the $20 million Series A in April 2022; the company reported $3.7 million revenue and 100,000 customers in 2024.

But the catch is the ceiling. The moment requirements move past forms, lookups, and approvals into real custom logic, Retool wins the bake-off — and AppSheet ships free inside Google Workspace for the lighter use cases. Pilot Team tier on one operations workflow for a quarter, then check renewal math.

I've been using Glide for 14 months now, primarily for internal tools and proof-of-concepts. What started as an experiment to reduce our backlog of 'small app requests' has become a legitimate part of our tech stack. We've built everything from inventory trackers to customer feedback dashboards, all without touching our engineering team's sprint capacity.

The real magic is watching non-technical staff build functional apps in days, not months. Our operations team now maintains their own tools, which has freed up significant development resources. However, we've hit ceiling limits on complexity - anything requiring custom business logic or heavy data processing still needs traditional development.

From an architecture standpoint, it's a mixed bag. The abstraction is excellent for simple use cases, but you'll feel the constraints when trying to implement sophisticated workflows or integrate with legacy systems.

Y Combinator W19 lineage, spreadsheet-first DNA. The platform reads like Google Sheets evolved into an app shell — that origin tells you who Glide is built for and where the ceiling sits.

Big Tables raises the row ceiling to a million on the $249/month Business tier, and Glide AI layers document analysis and image recognition onto Computed Columns. Workflows handle the action-trigger surface, with SSO and role-based access reserved for Business and Enterprise. A managed PWA runtime over a hosted data layer — clean, but you don't own the substrate.

But the catch shows up when complexity outgrows row math. AppSheet on Google Workspace owns the enterprise-distribution lane, and Retool owns the developer-extended lane — Glide's three-year position is the non-technical operator who never wants to leave. Commit when business systems is the buyer, not when engineering needs an internal-tools framework.

I've been using Glide daily since we needed to quickly build internal dashboards for our sales team. What started as a two-week experiment turned into our standard approach for internal tooling. The visual development environment lets me ship functional apps in hours instead of days, connecting directly to our Google Sheets and Airtable data.

The platform really shines for CRUD operations and simple workflows. I've built everything from inventory trackers to employee onboarding apps. The computed columns and relations features are surprisingly powerful once you understand the paradigm.

My main frustration is hitting the ceiling when requirements get complex. Custom JavaScript is limited, and integrating with our existing APIs requires workarounds through webhooks and Zapier. But for 80% of our internal tool needs, Glide delivers exactly what we need.

I've been using Glide for 14 months now, and it's genuinely changed how our marketing team operates. We started using it to build a customer portal for our enterprise clients, but it's grown into so much more - campaign tracking dashboards, event management apps, even our content calendar lives there now.

What sold me was the speed. We had a client dashboard live in three days that would've taken our dev team weeks. The Google Sheets integration means our data is always current, and I can actually build these tools myself without begging for developer time.

The analytics capabilities aren't as robust as dedicated BI tools, but for quick marketing dashboards and customer-facing apps, it hits the sweet spot between functionality and simplicity.

I've been using Glide for 14 months now to build internal apps for our finance team – budget trackers, expense approval workflows, and executive dashboards. What sold me initially was how quickly we could prototype solutions without IT resources. Within weeks, we had working apps that would've taken months through traditional development.

The pricing structure is straightforward but can catch you off guard. We started on the Pro plan and quickly hit user limits as adoption grew. Moving to Business tier doubled our costs, though the advanced security features were necessary for our compliance needs. The real value shows when I calculate what we've saved on developer hours – easily 10x our Glide spend.

My main frustration is the lack of detailed usage analytics. I need better visibility into which apps drive our row counts and API calls to optimize spending. But honestly, the speed at which my team can now address process gaps makes it worthwhile.

The thing an ops builder feels first is the row meter. A normal Glide Table caps at 25,000 rows; Big Tables, gated to Business at $249/month, scales to 10 million. That's when the inventory app stops being a toy.

The Visual App Builder auto-suggests components from spreadsheet columns — the workflow Softr and AppSheet both ship, but Glide's version feels less brittle when you rename a column upstream. Computed columns and relations cover the lookup-heavy patterns ops folks actually build. However, Custom Actions get awkward past three or four steps.

Docs read like the team uses the product — Big Tables and Glide AI pages walk through real ops examples, not empty starter apps. The catch is the pricing cliff. Team at $99/month sits at 100,000 rows; next stop is $249.

I started using Glide to build a simple inventory tracker for our small business, and now I've created five different apps our team uses daily. The magic is in how quickly I can turn a Google Sheet into something my colleagues actually want to use. Last month, I built a customer feedback portal in about two hours that would've taken weeks with traditional development.

The learning curve was gentle - I had my first app running in 30 minutes. What keeps me coming back is the reliability and how updates just work. The new Actions feature has been a game-changer for automating our repetitive tasks. My only real frustration is when I hit the limits of what's possible - sometimes I need just a bit more customization than Glide allows.

I jumped into Glide thinking I'd found the perfect tool for building internal apps without code. The first few months were great - I built three different apps for our team in days, not weeks. But as our needs grew, Glide couldn't keep up. The 25,000 row limit hit us hard when our customer database expanded. Performance tanked with just 15 concurrent users, and forget about offline functionality - it's basically non-existent despite being 'on the roadmap' for over a year. The final straw was when they sunset features we relied on without warning. Support's response? 'Try our new premium tier.' I'm now rebuilding everything in Retool.