Airtable vs CMS.js

Overview

Airtable

Stacks1.0K

Followers890

Votes40

CMS.js

Stacks5

Followers38

Votes0

Airtable vs CMS.js: What are the differences?

Airtable: *Real-time spreadsheet-database hybrid *. Working with Airtable is as fast and easy as editing a spreadsheet. But only Airtable is backed by the power of a full database, giving you rich features far beyond what a spreadsheet can offer; CMS.js: Fully Client-Side JavaScript Site Generator. CMS.js is fully client-side, Javascript site generator in the spirit of Jekyll that uses plain ol' HTML, CSS and Javascript to generate your website. CMS.js is like a file-based CMS. It takes your content, renders Markdown and delivers a complete website in Single-Page App fashion...without the aid of server-side scripting (no Node.js, PHP, Ruby, etc.).

Airtable belongs to "Spreadsheets as a Backend" category of the tech stack, while CMS.js can be primarily classified under "Static Site Generators".

CMS.js is an open source tool with 2.96K GitHub stars and 285 GitHub forks. Here's a link to CMS.js's open source repository on GitHub.

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CLI (Node.js)

Manual

Advice on Airtable, CMS.js

DetStartups

Nov 11, 2019

Needs advice

I'm trying to set up an ideally "no- code" way to have a backend of 3 different tables and be able to find a value in table #3 (contains businesses & cities) by first finding a record in table #1 (7,000+ zip codes) that corresponds to a city (table #2 has the unique cities), and then finding which businesses are located in these cities ( in this specific, original zipcode lookup). And return the business and a description via an API to a front-end results page, which happens to be a WordPress page - but doesn't need to be. I've tried Airtable's API, AirPress (a finicky WordPress plugin for Airtable's API), and I've looked at Sheetsu and a similar spreadsheet as backend and a simple API. I run into the issue where they work fine when you just need to query 1 table, but when you need to use the result from that query in another query to a different table. I'm back in SQL land - where sure it could be done with SQLite - needing to probably create an intersection table or a JOIN and build an API off of that. Is there a way to accomplish what I want without going back to SQL queries and some API?

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Comments

Detailed Comparison

Airtable	CMS.js
Working with Airtable is as fast and easy as editing a spreadsheet. But only Airtable is backed by the power of a full database, giving you rich features far beyond what a spreadsheet can offer.	CMS.js is fully client-side, Javascript site generator in the spirit of Jekyll that uses plain ol' HTML, CSS and Javascript to generate your website. CMS.js is like a file-based CMS. It takes your content, renders Markdown and delivers a complete website in Single-Page App fashion...without the aid of server-side scripting (no Node.js, PHP, Ruby, etc.).
Attachments;Link Tables;Fully mobile;Instant collaboration;Easily undo mistakes	Can serve full GitHub repos as a site; Can serve files from an Apache server as a site
Statistics
Stacks 1.0K	Stacks 5
Followers 890	Followers 38
Votes 40	Votes 0
Pros & Cons
Pros 19 Powerful and easy to use 8 Robust and dynamic 6 Quick UI Layer 4 Practical built in views 3 Robust API documentation	No community feedback yet
Integrations
No integrations available	GitHub

What are some alternatives to Airtable, CMS.js?

Jekyll

Think of Jekyll as a file-based CMS, without all the complexity. Jekyll takes your content, renders Markdown and Liquid templates, and spits out a complete, static website ready to be served by Apache, Nginx or another web server. Jekyll is the engine behind GitHub Pages, which you can use to host sites right from your GitHub repositories.

Hugo

Hugo is a static site generator written in Go. It is optimized for speed, easy use and configurability. Hugo takes a directory with content and templates and renders them into a full html website. Hugo makes use of markdown files with front matter for meta data.

Gatsby

Gatsby lets you build blazing fast sites with your data, whatever the source. Liberate your sites from legacy CMSs and fly into the future.

Hexo

Hexo is a fast, simple and powerful blog framework. It parses your posts with Markdown or other render engine and generates static files with the beautiful theme. All of these just take seconds.

Middleman

Middleman is a command-line tool for creating static websites using all the shortcuts and tools of the modern web development environment.

Gridsome

Build websites using latest web tech tools that developers love - Vue.js, GraphQL and Webpack. Get hot-reloading and all the power of Node.js. Gridsome makes building websites fun again.

Pelican

Pelican is a static site generator that supports Markdown and reST syntax. Write your weblog entries directly with your editor of choice (vim!) in reStructuredText or Markdown.

DocPad

Empower your website frontends with layouts, meta-data, pre-processors (markdown, jade, coffeescript, etc.), partials, skeletons, file watching, querying, and an amazing plugin system. DocPad will streamline your web development process allowing you to craft full-featured websites quicker than ever before.

Metalsmith

In Metalsmith, all of the logic is handled by plugins. You simply chain them together. Since everything is a plugin, the core library is actually just an abstraction for manipulating a directory of files.

11ty

A simpler static site generator. An alternative to Jekyll. Written in JavaScript. Transforms a directory of templates (of varying types) into HTML. Works with HTML, Markdown, Liquid, Nunjucks, Handlebars, Mustache, EJS, Haml, Pug, and JavaScript Template Literals.

Related Comparisons

CMS.js is an open source tool with 2.96K GitHub stars and 285 GitHub forks. Here's a link to CMS.js's open source repository on GitHub.

Airtable vs CMS.js