Help me understand why Honeycode

I was wondering if you could explain why I would want to use Honeycode and not just go to Airtable that is more mature / capable ?

I understand that the Amazon pricing is better than Airtable but help me understand why Honeycode please ?

I develop native mobile apps and this would be an excellent option for a BAAS and if you support .NET Standard and Honeycode as a BAAS then I'm in !

Hi @StephenH, welcome to the forum!

Honeycode isn't designed to be used as a BAAS. Currently, you aren't able to make apps or data public. You have to manually invite each user to your team.

You are really comparing apples and oranges here. I use and love Airtable, but Honeycode is not an Airtable clone. It's not like Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets, where Sheets is basically an Excel clone with collaborative editing. Honeycode lacks some of the polish and features you get with Airtable, but adds a whole new dimension of capabilities.

The problem with Airtable is that it offers very limited front-end interface capabilities. If your users are tech savvy and are willing to learn the platform, Airtable is great. There are all kinds of wonderful ways to summarize, slice and dice, and display your data. But it can be confusing for new users, particularly folks who expect it to work like Excel or Google Sheets. You also have to be willing to share all of your data with any users you give access to.

If you want to shield your users from all the complexity of Airtable and just want to enable them to interact with your data in certain well-defined ways, Airtable is very limiting. You can create forms to collect data, but you can't add any logic to the forms, and you can't create multi-stage forms. You are also very limited in how you display your data. You can create static reports, but you can't create highly dynamic reports that can be explored by your users without giving them access to everything.

Honeycode lets you create apps that sit on top of your data. These apps have full CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) capabilities. And you can create complex workflows to allow your users to interact with your data in well-defined ways. And you can even create different apps for different people or roles within your organization.

I wouldn't argue that Honeycode is better than Airtable. There are things Airtable can do that Honeycode can't, and Airtable is certainly more polished than Honeycode, although I expect Honeycode will improve over time. But you can't create an app or anything like an app with Airtable, and Honeycode lets you do that.

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ok, thanks for the response but the end game is to be Airtable, you can tell from how they are designing and building it.....

I guess I will have to pass because it doesn't offer things it should immediately like camera, barcode and mapping and it doesn't seem that there will be a way to expand it without the feature being added by Amazon (just like Airtable)

I mean, Amazon should just buy Airtable and put an option for a simpler interface in it and it's done, stable and feature rich!

Thanks