by justindeguzman on 5/25/22, 6:49 PM with 61 comments
Think of Arctype as “phpMyAdmin meets Postman”. Most of our team grew up learning how to program using the LAMP stack and we missed the experience of interacting with our databases using phpMyAdmin. We wanted to bring back the experience of a simple app that lets you explore and query your databases, but with an updated and modernized interface.
At the same time, we were heavily inspired by the ease-of-use and collaboration features of Postman. We wanted to create a super useful, collaborative app like Postman that your whole team uses for development—but for databases instead of APIs.
We have a few thousand developers using Arctype today but we haven’t shared it with the HN community yet–we’re excited to hear your feedback! We also have a very active Discord community at arctype.com/discord where developers can ask questions and talk about databases/SQL.
I’m sure the community has a lot of questions, so we’ve compiled a list of the most common ones we get:
“Why isn’t Arctype open source yet?”
It will be soon! We’ve been focusing mostly on features that users have been asking for, as well as performance, stability, and security. We’re not completely happy yet with the documentation and development experience of contributing to Arctype, but this will be a core focus for us in the coming weeks. We just want to make sure it will be very easy for the community to contribute once we publish on GitHub.
“How does Arctype make money?”
Arctype is free (and will be free forever) for most developers. We have a typical SaaS model for large teams based on a per-seat license as well as an enterprise version that companies can run on their own infrastructure.
“Why is Arctype built using Electron?”
We wanted to make it easy for anyone to use Arctype–Electron is currently the most practical solution to make it cross-platform and also accessible via a web app. Apps like VSCode and Discord have shown that it’s possible to achieve decent performance so we’re confident that over time the advantages of developing on Electron will outweigh the slight performance hit compared to native apps.
“Does Arctype need an account?”
You can use Arctype without an account or you can login via email or Google. Certain features such as sharing queries and dashboards with your team require an account.
“Is Arctype secure / does it store credentials?”
All of your credentials are stored locally, and queries are also executed locally on your machine. We do have a feature that lets you automatically share your credentials to your team, but that is strictly opt-in, and all credentials are encrypted on our backend. Additionally, we have an enterprise version that companies can run on their own infrastructure for organizations that have stringent security requirements. If you’d like to learn more, we have more info at arctype.com/security.
“Does Arctype use any analytics software?”
Arctype has usage-based analytics and error reporting (we use Sentry) that we use to improve the app and to help us fix bugs/crashes. However, this can be turned off. Additionally, Arctype can be used fully offline.
“Why doesn’t Arctype support X database?”
Email me at justin at arctype.com :) We’ll make it happen.
by eatonphil on 5/25/22, 7:05 PM
Sweet! Excited to have you join the community of open-source data tools. :)
by Diggsey on 5/25/22, 7:58 PM
Why? Because I need to be able to do more than just run queries. I need to be able to manage users & permissions, see the current server configuration, kill connections from other clients if necessary, etc.
The collaboration features are a nice touch, that certainly makes this stand out compared to others, but if I still need to use another client as well then it's just not going to work...
by micahjm on 5/25/22, 7:18 PM
Unfortunately, as I used it week after week I kept running into cases where it was really slow or completely unresponsive (with no error message or loading indicator), or where it simply was consuming a lot of resources on my Mac. I got in the habit of waiting a few seconds, giving up, killing the app and restarting it.
To be fair, part of the issue may have been me tunneling to a free Fly.io postgres database, which wasn't particularly fast. I eventually got so frustrated I paid for Postico (a barebones native MacOS app), and couldn't be happier.
I realize it takes a lot of time and expertise to build a complex cross-platform web app that doesn't have memory leaks and performance problems, and I hope Arctype will get better over time (like the VSCode or Slack apps). Looking forward to trying it again at some point.
by sanketc on 5/25/22, 8:16 PM
by infogulch on 5/25/22, 9:02 PM
[0]: homepage: https://www.ultorg.com/
[1]: 10m video: https://www.hytradboi.com/2022/ultorg-a-user-interface-for-r...
by epberry on 5/25/22, 6:55 PM
by mhamann on 5/25/22, 7:51 PM
In my admittedly limited experience using it, I found that some MySql datatypes seemed to be missing from the table editor (e.g., `TEXT`). Not sure why this is and I haven't had time to dig further.
It's promising, and way better than even some of the other paid options. (Like, what is DBeaver even doing??)
by felixsch on 5/25/22, 7:11 PM
by dliff on 5/25/22, 8:53 PM
by willhoyle on 5/26/22, 1:46 AM
Hope they can improve, might give it another go once I have time.
by ushakov on 5/25/22, 9:24 PM
how does your product compare to TablePlus?
by alesua93 on 5/25/22, 7:16 PM
by keithnz on 5/26/22, 2:17 AM
by msyoung2012 on 5/25/22, 8:20 PM
by alephnan on 5/26/22, 6:30 AM
Is it currently available on the web? I want to try but do not want to download a binary.
by agucova on 5/25/22, 9:13 PM
by silax on 5/25/22, 9:18 PM
by ushakov on 5/25/22, 9:43 PM
the difference is that they have the resources and employ people who work full-time to not make Electron suck
by t3hGrandPoobah on 5/25/22, 9:53 PM
by alexvoda on 5/25/22, 7:40 PM
Have you considered transitioning to something that uses the system WebView like Tauri or NeutralinoJS? If you did, what were the blockers?
by Kabie on 5/26/22, 2:02 AM
> Please move Arctype into your Applications folder
What's the difference?
by cssanchez on 5/25/22, 9:03 PM
How focused are you on providing top notch visualizations such as maps with pins using OSM or custom GeoJSON maps, and other more dynamic type of data vis?
by ravivyas on 5/25/22, 7:08 PM
Disclaimer: Worked with them in the past
by mathenel on 5/28/22, 5:24 AM
by ysleepy on 5/25/22, 8:01 PM
arctype.com, intercom.io, sentry.io and s3.amazonaws.com.
These all happen while the window isn't even loaded on first start.
I get that I'm not entitled to anything, but jesus, I dislike the electron age. Well, not that other apps are much better, I'm just sad.
by cercatrova on 5/26/22, 1:50 AM
by mixedCase on 5/25/22, 7:42 PM
FWIW: I would pay 100$ yearly for a JetBrains like license to a solution like this written in something like Qt or Gtk that could successfully replace DBeaver for me.
by hiccuphippo on 5/26/22, 4:34 AM
I wonder if this is really true. As I understand, Discord had to start using rust to overcome the slowness of electron, VSCode had to add some really complex code to render the text fast enough. At what point is it easier to just use native code over trying to optimize the electron beast? FWIW lite-xl[0] has a better approach. A core app built with C and SDL and then high level parts made in Lua.
by jachee on 5/25/22, 9:28 PM
Just put a demo on the site.