Best Glide Alternatives in 2026: 12 No-Code App Builders Compared

Updated August 2026

Google AppSheet and Adalo are the closest doppelgangers if you just want another spreadsheet-to-app builder, Bubble and FlutterFlow are where you go once Glide's ceiling gets in the way of what you're trying to build, and Airtable or Knack are the honest answer if you never actually needed a deployed mobile app, only a shared database with a decent front end on it. Every tool below was evaluated on billing model, output type (native app versus web app versus internal tool), customization ceiling, and total cost at a realistic team size, with pricing checked against each vendor's own page in August 2026 and clearly labeled wherever a vendor doesn't publish one.

This is written for operations and product leaders who came to Glide to turn a spreadsheet or database into a mobile-friendly app without writing code, and who are now leaving for one of four reasons: the pricing changed under them, the new credit-based billing feels unpredictable, they hit a wall on customization, or the project outgrew a spreadsheet-backed app and needs a real native build or a proper internal tool instead. One thing before the list. Glide itself is genuinely hard to price right now, because Glide's own pricing page and its own help center currently disagree with each other, and that disagreement gets its own section below because it's the most useful thing you can know before comparing anything else.

Key Facts

• Gartner forecasts the low-code development technologies market to reach $44.5 billion by 2026, growing 19% over four years, and expects 75% of new application development to run on low-code technologies by 2026, up from 40% in 2021, per Gartner as reported by InfoWorld.
• By 2026, developers outside formal IT departments will make up at least 80% of the user base for low-code development tools, up from 60% in 2021, per Gartner as reported by InfoWorld.
• 78% of director-level-or-higher developers say their organization already empowers people outside IT through a citizen developer strategy, or plans to within 12 months, per Forrester's Developer Survey, cited in a Forrester report Airtable distributes to prospective customers.
• Companies that empower citizen developers score 33% higher on innovation than bottom-quartile companies, per McKinsey's Developer Velocity research.
• Glide's own pricing pages currently disagree with each other: glideapps.com/pricing shows a credit-metered GlideOS rate card while help.glideapps.com still documents the older flat-monthly Explorer, Maker, and Business plans as current, both confirmed by us on 22 August 2026.

Quick Comparison Table

Why Glide Itself Is the Hardest Tool on This Page to Price

Before comparing Glide to anything else, know this: Glide is currently quoting two different prices to two different audiences, and neither of its own pages calls the other one wrong.

Open glideapps.com/pricing today (checked 22 August 2026) and you get the GlideOS rate card: Free at $0 for one project with limited credits, Solo at $25 a month for five projects with a database included and 100 credits, Team at $125 a month starting at five members with 50 credits per member, and Enterprise on quote. Every number on that page is monthly. No annual rate appears anywhere on it.

Open help.glideapps.com instead and you land on an article titled "Pricing Plans (as of November 1, 2025)" that documents a completely different set of tiers: Free at $0, Explorer at $19 a month billed annually or $25 monthly, Maker at $49 a month annually or $60 monthly, Business at $199 a month annually or $249 monthly, and Enterprise on quote. That article never says these plans are legacy or superseded. Glide's own documentation elsewhere still states plainly that "Glide offers five plans: Free, Explorer, Maker, Business, and Enterprise," and separately describes a Legacy tier reserved for accounts that predate 17 January 2024.

That's not a stale page someone forgot to update. It's a company mid-migration to usage-based billing, with its marketing page pointing new signups at credits while its help center still walks existing customers through flat monthly plans. Before you budget a renewal or a switch away from Glide, open your own account's billing page and confirm which of these two rate cards you're actually on. What you find may not match either page exactly.

The credit-based shift is the substantive change here, more than any single price on either page. A flat Maker or Business plan tells you your bill in advance. A credit pool tells you your bill only after usage has already landed, and heavy publishing, high traffic, or AI-assisted building can burn through credits faster than a monthly plan ever would have. That loss of predictability, more than the sticker price, is the real reason this comparison has an audience in 2026, and it's worth weighing against every alternative below, several of which, Knack and Adalo among them, still sell flat pricing precisely because buyers value knowing the number ahead of time.

How Billing Actually Works Across These 12 Tools

Glide's credit metering is not unique to Glide. Once you start shopping alternatives, you'll find the same four billing shapes repeat across the category, and the shape matters more than the sticker price because it decides whether your bill is predictable or not.

The Free Tier Reality Check

Half the reason people leave Glide is a pricing surprise, so read the free tier of whatever comes next before you commit, not after.

1. Google AppSheet - the other spreadsheet-to-app giant

AppSheet answers to almost the same pitch as Glide: point it at a Google Sheet, Excel file, or Cloud SQL table, and it generates a working mobile and web app with forms, views, and offline sync. The difference is who owns it. Google bought AppSheet in 2020 and has spent the years since wiring it directly into Workspace, so a Gmail-and-Sheets shop gets an app builder that already understands its data without an export step.

The audience is teams of 5 to 500 who are already inside Google's ecosystem and want field forms, inspection checklists, or simple internal apps without touching Glide's newer credit system. Pricing is refreshingly boring: flat per-user monthly tiers, no workload meter, no credits. The trade-off shows up at the high end. Publisher Pro, the tier built for public apps with no login required, is a flat $50 a month per app with unlimited users, which is the AppSheet answer to Glide's old unlimited-user promise, but every other tier bills per named user, so a big external audience with individual logins gets expensive fast.

Pricing: Starter is $5 per user per month. Core is $10 per user per month and is included in most paid Google Workspace plans already. Enterprise Plus is $20 per user per month and requires a Google Workspace administrator account or a free Cloud Identity account to purchase. Publisher Pro is a flat $50 per month per app for public apps that require no sign-in and support unlimited users. The free tier covers up to 10 test users during prototyping, per AppSheet's pricing page. Prices are billed monthly with no annual discount shown on the page. Teams evaluating this alongside a Microsoft-centric option should also see best Power Apps alternatives.

Best for: Teams of 5 to 500 already on Google Workspace who want a spreadsheet-to-app builder without Glide's credit system.

2. Adalo - the closest thing to a native app-store app

Adalo is the pick when "mobile-friendly web app" isn't good enough and you actually need something in the App Store and Google Play with your name on it. It builds true native apps rather than a responsive web wrapper, with a drag-and-drop screen editor, a built-in database, and enough component depth to handle marketplaces, social features, and booking flows that push past what a table-driven tool like Glide was ever built for.

Read the free plan carefully before you get excited about it. Adalo's Free tier is $0, but it publishes 0 apps, meaning you can build and preview but never actually ship without moving to a paid plan. Once you do, the pricing is unusually simple for the category: flat monthly fees with unlimited app actions and no usage-based fees layered on top, which is the opposite of the credit anxiety driving people off Glide right now.

Pricing: Free is $0 but publishes 0 apps. Starter is $36 per month billed annually or $45 monthly, for 1 published app. Professional is $52 per month annually or $65 monthly, for 2 apps. Team is $160 per month annually or $200 monthly, for 5 apps. Every paid tier includes unlimited app actions with no separate usage fee, per Adalo's pricing page.

Best for: Teams of 1 to 20 who need a real native mobile app rather than a web app, and want flat pricing with no usage meter.

3. Softr - the modern portal builder for data you already have

Softr solves the interface half of the problem, not the database half. Point it at Airtable, Google Sheets, HubSpot, or its own included store, and it turns that data into a branded client portal, member site, or internal directory in an afternoon, with the kind of current design that makes Glide's default look dated by comparison.

The billing shape is closer to Glide's old flat-plan world than to a per-seat tool: Softr bands its plans by builder count and app-user count rather than charging per individual login, so a portal serving a few hundred clients is a plan tier decision, not a line-item explosion. Softr repriced on 5 August 2026, so treat any Softr number you see elsewhere on the internet as stale until you check the vendor page directly. The one thing to budget separately is the data layer. Softr is a front end, so if your records live in Airtable, you're paying for Airtable's plan underneath the Softr subscription.

Pricing: Free is $0 for up to 3 builders and 5 app users combined. Basic is $19 per month billed annually or $25 monthly, for 1 builder plus 5 team and 5 client users. Pro is $99 per month annually or $119 monthly, for 2 builders and up to 50 team, 50 client users. Business is $329 per month annually or $395 monthly, for 3 builders and up to 100 team, 500 client users. Extra app users run $1 to $5 a month and extra builders $5 to $24 a month depending on tier, per Softr's pricing documentation.

Best for: Teams of 2 to 50 who need a good-looking client or member portal this month and already have somewhere to keep the data.

4. FlutterFlow - when you need code you can actually own

FlutterFlow is the graduate-school option for a Glide user who has started to feel boxed in. It builds real Flutter apps, the same framework professional mobile teams use, and it lets you download the actual source code or an APK rather than locking your app inside a proprietary runtime. That single feature, ownership of the underlying code, is the whole pitch for teams that suspect they'll eventually need a developer to take over.

It's a heavier tool than Glide in every sense. You're working with Flutter widgets and app architecture concepts, not a spreadsheet turned into screens, and the learning curve reflects that. Pricing runs on a seat-and-credit hybrid: a flat monthly fee per plan, then AI-assisted building features metered through "lite credits" that top up with each paid tier. The page shows a monthly-versus-annual toggle claiming roughly 25% savings on the annual basis, but it does not clearly display the resulting annual figures next to the monthly ones, so verify the exact annual number before you commit to a yearly contract.

Pricing: Free is $0 for up to 2 projects with 10 lite credits. Basic is $39 a month for unlimited projects, code download, APK download, and 100 lite credits a month. Growth is $80 a month for the first seat and $55 for a second, with 200 lite credits per seat. Business is $150 a month for the first seat and $85 for seats two through five, with 400 lite credits per seat. Enterprise pricing is not published, per FlutterFlow's pricing page.

Best for: Teams of 1 to 5 who have outgrown a spreadsheet-backed app and want real, exportable native code.

5. Bubble - when the logic is the hard part, not the interface

Bubble is what to reach for when the problem was never the interface, it was the logic. Conditional workflows, multi-step processes, marketplaces with two-sided payments, anything with branching rules that a table-driven tool like Glide simply cannot express, Bubble handles through a full visual programming layer sitting on top of a real database.

The free plan is genuinely real, and Bubble's own pricing FAQ says it "comes with more than enough workload to build any kind of app." The nuance is that Free and Agency plans are designed for development and cannot purchase workload tiers or overage capacity, which in practice means a live, public-facing app needs a paid plan. Every paid tier includes 100,000 monthly workload units for its Development environment, and workload consumed beyond a tier's allowance without a subscription costs $0.30 per 1,000 units. That metered structure is the same credit-anxiety problem Glide users are trying to escape, just measured in workload units instead of credits, so budget a buffer rather than sizing exactly to your current traffic.

Pricing: Free covers development only, with no purchasable workload. Starter is $29 per month billed annually or $32 monthly for web only, rising to $59 annually or $69 monthly for web plus mobile. Growth is $119 annually or $134 monthly for web only, up to $209 annually or $249 monthly for web plus mobile. Team is $349 annually or $399 monthly for web only, up to $549 annually or $649 monthly for web plus mobile. Enterprise is custom. All paid apps include 100,000 monthly workload units in Development, with overage billed at $0.30 per 1,000 units, per Bubble's pricing plans documentation. If Bubble's own workload meter is the new problem rather than the solution, best Bubble alternatives picks up exactly where this leaves off.

Best for: Teams of 2 to 50 building complex web apps with real business logic that a spreadsheet-backed tool cannot express.

6. Airtable - the database, if that's all you actually needed

Everything from here down replaces the database half of what Glide does, not the deployed-app half, and for a meaningful share of Glide users, that's the honest answer. If your Glide app was really just a way for your own team to view and edit a shared spreadsheet on their phones, you never needed an app platform at all.

Airtable is the category default for that job: a familiar grid, real relational links between tables, and alternate views (kanban, calendar, gallery, Gantt) on top of the same records, backed by the largest ecosystem of templates, extensions, and integrations in this list. What disappears when you move here is any concept of an external user with a login and record-level permissions. Interfaces can give internal staff a simplified view, but there's no portal for customers, patients, or contractors the way Glide, AppSheet, or Adalo provide one.

Pricing: Free covers 1,000 records per base. Team is $20 per seat per month billed annually, $24 monthly, with 50,000 records per base. Business is $45 per seat per month billed annually, $54 monthly, with 125,000 records per base. Enterprise Scale is custom, per Airtable's pricing page. If Airtable's own seat pricing or record caps become the next problem, best Airtable alternatives and the wider best no-code database software guide map where teams go from there.

Best for: Internal teams of 5 to 100 whose Glide app never actually had an outside user logging into it.

7. Knack - unlimited logins at a smaller-team price

Knack belongs on this list for the same reason it tops our Caspio alternatives roundup: it's one of the only mainstream platforms left that bills per account rather than per user, so an app with hundreds of outside logins doesn't multiply your bill the way a per-seat tool would. If the part of Glide you actually valued was that end users didn't cost you anything extra, Knack is the nearest thing to that model outside Glide's own old Classic plans.

It builds real application platforms with roles, record-level visibility rules, and page-level structure, closer to Caspio's DataPage model than to Glide's table-first approach. The trade-off is a builder that feels a generation older than Glide's or Softr's, and no permanent free plan, only a time-limited trial, which matters if you were relying on Glide's free tier to prototype before committing.

Pricing: Starter is $49 per month billed annually, $59 monthly, with a $19 monthly intro rate for the first 3 months, covering 20,000 records. Pro is $110 per month annually, $130 monthly, with a $49 monthly intro rate for 3 months, covering 50,000 records. Corporate starts at $250 per month with 125,000 to 2.5 million records. Enterprise is custom, per Knack's pricing page. For the fuller comparison this billing model comes from, see best Caspio alternatives.

Best for: Teams of 2 to 50 running an external-facing app who want flat, unlimited-user pricing without Glide's credit meter.

8. Zoho Creator - the right call only if you're already on Zoho

Zoho Creator is a genuine application platform, not a database with forms bolted on. You model data, then build web and mobile apps with real workflow logic written in Deluge, Zoho's scripting language, and it handles mobile output better than most database-first tools on this list.

The reason to pick it is almost never the builder itself. It's that your CRM, books, help desk, and HR records may already live in Zoho, so Creator reads them natively instead of through an integration you have to maintain and monitor. If your organization already holds a Zoho One license, Creator may already be included at no extra marginal cost, which would make it the cheapest option on this entire page, so check that before pricing anything else. If you're not a Zoho customer already, Deluge is one more language to learn and the vendor still won't quote a firm price without a sales conversation.

Pricing: Zoho Creator's public pricing page lists Standard, Professional, Enterprise, and a custom Flex plan, plus a free edition limited to one app, but the price table did not render for verification when checked in August 2026. Third-party listings (reported) put Standard around $8 per user per month, Professional around $20, and Enterprise around $25, all billed annually, per Capterra's Zoho Creator pricing listing. Confirm everything directly with Zoho before budgeting.

Best for: Companies of 10 to 500 already standardized on Zoho who want apps sitting directly on existing Zoho records.

9. Retool - when a query does what the no-code builder cannot

Retool is the endpoint for teams that hit a wall inside a table-driven builder and realized the wall was a few lines of SQL wide. It's low-code by design: drag components onto a canvas, then write real queries and JavaScript against any API or database to make them do genuine work. Operations teams end up here when the logic got too specific for a visual builder, or when the data lives across several systems that no single-source tool like Glide can reach. That fragmentation is common rather than rare: IT teams spend 39% of their time building custom integrations, and 80% of organizations name data silos as the single biggest barrier to their automation and AI goals, per the 2025 MuleSoft Connectivity Benchmark Report, which surveyed 1,050 IT leaders.

Understand the billing before you fall for the demo. Retool prices builders, internal users, and external users separately, and external users are where the shape diverges hardest from a Glide-style flat plan. Business builders run $50 a month billed annually, internal users $15, and external users are banded: free up to 50, then $8 for 51 to 250, $6 for 251 to 500, and $4 above 500. The first 50 external users are genuinely generous. The 500th is not, so if you're serving a large public audience, Retool is one of the more expensive replacements on this page.

Pricing: Free covers up to 5 users, 5GB database plus 5GB file storage, and 500 workflow runs a month. Team bills builders at $10 a month annually ($12 monthly) and internal users at $5 ($7 monthly), with 5,000 workflow runs a month. Business bills builders at $50 a month annually ($65 monthly) and internal users at $15 ($18 monthly). External users on Business run free from 0 to 50, then $8 monthly annually for 51 to 250, $6 for 251 to 500, and $4 above 500. Enterprise is quote-only, per Retool's pricing page. If Retool's external-user cost is the dealbreaker, best Retool alternatives is the more direct comparison.

Best for: Engineering-supported teams of 20 to 1,000 building internal tools on messy, multi-source data, with fewer than about 50 external users.

10. Appsmith - open source with an honest upgrade path

Appsmith sits in the same conversation as Retool and Budibase but earns its own slot for pricing that's unusually easy to read. It leans toward internal tools built on data already spread across several systems, and suits teams comfortable writing some SQL and JavaScript behind a drag-and-drop canvas. Nothing about the data source is off limits.

Pricing is legible in a way few tools on this page manage: free up to 5 users on the cloud plan, then a flat $15 per user per month on Business up to 99 users, with builders billed as ordinary users rather than at a premium. The real draw for teams leaving a proprietary tool like Glide is the fully open-source, self-hosted Community edition, which is genuinely free with unlimited users under the Apache 2.0 license. Just don't confuse the two free things. The cloud free plan stops at 5 users; only self-hosting removes the ceiling entirely. The other thing to plan around is the enterprise jump: crossing 100 users moves you to a $2,500-a-month floor, a cliff rather than a slope.

Pricing: Free covers up to 5 users on cloud, with 5 workspaces and 3 Git repos. Business is $15 per user per month for up to 99 users, with builders billed as standard users, and no annual discount published. Enterprise is $2,500 a month starting at 100 users, with SAML and OIDC SSO, SCIM, and CI/CD included. The self-hosted Community edition is free and open source with unlimited users, per Appsmith's pricing page. See best Appsmith alternatives if the cloud ceiling itself is the problem.

Best for: Technical teams of 5 to 100 who want an open-source internal tool builder with a clear, predictable paid tier.

11. Budibase - self-host the whole platform inside your own boundary

Budibase reframes the compliance and control question rather than paying a vendor to answer it. Instead of trusting a third party's security review, you self-host the platform inside infrastructure your organization already controls, and the self-hosted open-source edition is free with unlimited apps, actions, and users on one workspace. For teams whose real objection to Glide was never the price but the idea of their data living on someone else's servers, that's a materially different answer than any hosted tool on this page can give.

It's a real app builder rather than a database with forms on top: internal tables or an external source, a screen designer, role-based access, and automation. The trap is treating the cloud pricing like the self-hosted pricing, because they behave like different products. Extra creators cost $50 each per month and end users $5 each on cloud, so a modestly sized external app adds up in cloud dollars fast, while the identical build costs only infrastructure and a maintainer when self-hosted.

Pricing: Self-hosted open source is free with unlimited actions, apps, automations, and users on one workspace. Cloud Pro is $19 a month billed yearly, $22.80 monthly, for 1 creator. Cloud Premium is $49 a month yearly, $58.80 monthly, with extra creators at $50 each per month and end users at $5 each per month. Cloud Business is $299 a month billed yearly for 3 creators. Enterprise is custom, per Budibase's pricing page. Teams weighing this against a full automation platform rather than just an app builder should also see best workflow automation software.

Best for: Organizations of 10 to 500 with an infrastructure owner who would rather host the platform than trust someone else's security review.

12. Xano - the backend Glide never gave you

Xano is the odd one out here on purpose. It doesn't build screens at all. It's a genuine backend and API layer, a real Postgres database with visual API-building on top, meant to be paired with a frontend builder rather than replacing one. For a Glide user who's hit the ceiling on record volume, data relationships, or backend logic that a table-driven tool simply can't express, Xano is what sits underneath a new frontend, whether that's FlutterFlow, Bubble, Softr, or a hand-built app.

That single-purpose focus is the whole value proposition. Where Glide's database is a convenience baked into the app builder, Xano's is a production-grade backend you can scale independently, version, and query through a real API that other tools can call. The trade-off is exactly what you'd expect: no visual screens, no app builder, nothing to show a stakeholder without connecting a frontend tool first.

Pricing: Free covers a Postgres database up to 100,000 records, 1 workspace, 1GB of watermarked image storage, and a 10-requests-per-20-seconds rate limit. Essential is $85 a month billed annually. Pro is $224 a month billed annually. Larger volumes are custom on quote, per Xano's pricing page. For pairing a backend like this with automation across other tools, best Zapier alternatives and best Make alternatives cover the connective layer.

Best for: Technical teams of 2 to 50 who've outgrown a spreadsheet-backed database and want a real backend behind a separate frontend builder.

How to Choose: Decision Framework

Choose the app output and operating model first, then compare the builders that fit that route.

If it turns out your team needed process and workflow structure more than a raw database, best SmartSuite alternatives is worth a look before you commit to any of the twelve above.

What to Do Next

Before comparing another feature grid, answer two questions honestly. First, does anyone outside your own team log into this app, and does it need to feel like a real native app on their phone? That single question sends you toward Adalo or FlutterFlow if yes on both, AppSheet or Knack if the users are external but a web app is fine, and Airtable if the answer to the first half is no at all.

Second, check your own Glide account's billing page before you decide anything. Confirm whether you're on the credit-metered GlideOS plans or the older flat-monthly Classic plans, because that single fact changes what "leaving for cheaper" actually means in your case. Then take the single most complex screen in your current Glide app, the one with the most conditional logic, and rebuild only that screen in your top two candidates. Give it a day. Whatever breaks in that day is what will break during the real migration.

Related Resources:

• Best No-Code App Builders in 2026
• Best Bubble Alternatives
• Best Retool Alternatives
• Best Appsmith Alternatives
• Best Power Apps Alternatives
• Best Airtable Alternatives
• Best Caspio Alternatives
• Best No-Code Database Software in 2026