[laffra]

Rowzero is a better spreadsheet, while PySheets is a better Jupyter Notebook. Although they converge in certain aspects, their distinct target audiences set them apart. This divergence may create some overlap, but it also leaves ample room for user preference.

PySheets currently runs inside the browser, on top of WebAsm, and the limitations there are bigger than just Python's slowness. You have only 4G addressable memory, including the interpreter and libraries. Network bandwidth is also a limiting factor for client-side computation.

That said, PySheets can render a sheet based on a 50,000-row Excel sheet in 0.5s and needs about 20s to do a full end-to-end recompute run. There are limits to what you can do in the browser without using an external kernel that can run Polars on large datasets. But, I think most people will be fine with what PySheets can let them do.

Finally, as the author of PySheets I am honored that a "competitor" sees us as a threat. I am quite impressed by Rowzero myself. Nice work :-)

[breckognize]

Kudos on the technical achievement. We considered the thick client approach you're doing, and one of the reasons we punted was because it was so hard.

One really nice thing about your approach is it minimizes infrastructure cost. That positions you well for embedding use cases, like New York Times visualizations, that we struggle to do economically.

Best of luck!

[laffra]

Yes, my total development bill for EVERYTHING, including DigitalOcean, Google, and OpenAI is about $15.

[donjigweed]

Kudos to you. I would be quite flattered to have built a thing that competes with what a small startup built.

[laffra]

I am feeling pretty Okay now, indeed. I played golf today. It was on a Par3 course, so it only tested my short game. However, I scored -1, with almost a hole-in-one. I blame it on the success of PySheets :-)

[CMCDragonkai]

I've been trying to get a platform to create dashboards where some data comes from spreadsheets and some data comes from databases. Something like a notebook interface crossed with a grafana interface while also enabling forms for input is sorely missing. While it can be stitched together, speed/performance and flexibility (in terms of JS or Python) seems to be lacking atm.

I want to use such a thing to create internal dashboards similar to retool.

[bigger_cheese]

Does it need to be live (i.e when database or underlying spreadsheet updates does it need to be reflected in real time on the dashboard) or are you ok with static display.

Live updating data is a pain I've messed around using javascript to force refresh html iframes on a timer. But I was never really satisfied with this. I've heard you can do things with websockets but that is starting to get too complicated for me (I'm not a programmer).

For static stuff one of the data scientists in my org pointed me to Streamlit (https://streamlit.io/) it's a python package I found very easy to use. Can easily combine SQL with CSV imports and display them all on one dashboard. Can use forms toggle butotns etc to control the display.

[laffra]

You can do that today with PySheets. On the PySheets landing page, you can find a live example. The data comes directly out of a sheet that uses a service to convert metrics into charts. For example, one of the three charts shown on https://pysheets.app/#Traction is directly embedded as an iframe from https://pysheets.app/embed?U=uXNuCGO2JU1E5aL7zcOh&k=C12. If I rerun the sheet that produces the charts, the PySheets landing page updates automatically with the latest data.

[breckognize]

You should try http://rowzero.io. We connect directly to DBs and data warehouses, support Python natively, and scale up to hundreds of millions of rows.

Lots of people use us for dashboards.