I work at Grist, the "tableur collaboratif" (collaborative spreadsheet) listed on the La Suite homepage. We're in the interesting situation of being both a NYC-based company, and open source software the French gov has adopted and is helping to develop. Grist is mostly a node backend. So it is a complicated story. The key is having code the gov can review and trust and run it on sovereign infrastructure.
Grist https://www.getgrist.com/
A write-up of how the French gov uses it https://interoperable-europe.ec.europa.eu/collection/open-so...
Your position is fantastic because it immediately puts to death all of that nationalistic nonsense about the EU becoming "anti-American" by enforcing privacy laws on US Big Tech etc, when in fact they are just protecting their citizens' rights against unethical business models regardless of origin. I might be naive, but your company to me represents a win for free/open software and cross-country collaboration.
That being said, I should ask: to what extent do you see being US-based an advantage or a problem in the current state of things? For example, in regards to exports controls, or any other such thing that may potentially limit your business scope depending on $current_admin.
wow it reminds me of Microsoft Access, a great piece of software in terms of rapidly building an application!
Does grist have forms?
Form support is touted on the homepage: https://www.getgrist.com/forms/
For what it's worth, which isn't much because this is probably outdated: I remember trying grist a few years ago and leaving mildly unimpressed with form support (I think because I was hoping to have image upload in the forms and that wasn't supported yet).
Grist forms support uploads since 2025 https://github.com/gristlabs/grist-core/pull/1655
Since it is relevant here: support for uploads was code written by a French contributor, and reviewed by a developer working for the French gov (ANCT/DINUM) and a developer working for Grist Labs. Grist Labs has since maintained and improved on it. The forms feature itself was inspired by an integration built by Camille Legeron at ANCT.
I'm not an MS dev type, but I've often seen these forms questions. What made their forms so easy, or more in general what is so complicated about forms that this was even a tool so many liked?
MS Access was on its way out by the time I started working in software, but the simplest explanation I can give about why the "forms" question is this, let's say you're a business person and...:
It's basically if you could turn a SQlite file into a low-coded desktop app.Access is an FE for db — JET Red, specifically.
JET Blue aka ESE is currently used by products like Active Directory and Exchange.
With Access, a business doing data entry could -- with a business user not a software engineer -- craft a Form and voila, easy onboarding to train new employees instead of filling out sheets of paper and filing them.
If you want forms try https://visualdb.com/ it is another tool that aims to be Microsoft Access
Not open source though?
Right but it is cheaper than open source products if you self-host. Most open source products in this space, including grist, are only partially open source.
[grist employee here] Grist forms are open source and were used to keep the toilets clean at FOSDEM just a few days ago https://fosstodon.org/@grist/116001932837956733
Everything you see in our standard docker image is open source. Yes, you can enable and pay for enterprise features too.
It is weird that your enterprise features are not self-hostable even if a customer pays. I understand if some features are not open source, but why make it not self-hostable? Self-hosting is a requirement for confidential data.
The enterprise features are self-hostable. Look at "your servers" on the pricing page for Grist. Individuals (and orgs with < $1 million in annual income) quality for free activation keys btw.
Kudos, Grist is great ! Super features, quite seamless only the UI could be more modern (or user stylesheet customizable) if you get to it.
Thanks! Fair about styling :). You can bring your own stylesheet https://support.getgrist.com/self-managed/#how-do-i-customiz...