Documents and notes decision
Fibery
A technical user can build a narrow, self-hosted replacement for core workspace+DB+views+automations and semantic search, but Fibery's enterprise compliance, integrations, polished UI, template library and hosted AI quotas make the full product expensive to replicate and favor keeping the paid service for broad team use.
Visit website↗Open-source builds that already do this
Every project below is open source and already does this job today. Fork one, self-host it, or take the parts you need — the build prompt further down assumes an empty file, and this is the shortcut past that. Licences differ; check the one on each card before you ship.
What a replacement has to do
- Provide a single interconnected workspace where users create custom databases, link entities, view them in table/board/timeline, edit records, run simple automations, and search across data (including semantic search).
What it still won’t have
- SOC 2 Type II compliance and enterprise security packaging
- Large template library and polished multi-view UX
- Built-in integrations and two-way sync connectors (Jira, Zendesk, Slack, Zapier)
- Mature automations quotas, hosted reliability, and customer support
- Per-seat AI credits and transcription quota
What remains hard
- Compliance and regulation
SOC 2 Type II compliance
First-year cost
Keep paying
Paying is—cheaper in year one.
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 5 seats.
Money you would actually spend
Time you would spend
—
What you would spend
What we assumed
The verdict above measures whether you could build it. This one is only about money.
Runnable build prompt
Build a minimal Fibery-like workspace using Postgres + Node (Express) + TypeORM backend, React + TypeScript frontend, and Redis for background jobs. Implement: (1) dynamic entity types stored as JSONSchema-backed Postgres tables; (2) CRUD REST and GraphQL endpoints; (3) Board and Table React views with inline edit and entity detail pane; (4) relations between entity types (foreign-key linking) surfaced in UI; (5) a simple automation engine that runs rule triggers (on-create/on-update) and executes webhooks or server-side JS; (6) full-text + semantic search using Elasticsearch or Pinecone with embeddings via OpenAI; (7) auth (JWT), per-user license enforcement for one paid seat, workspace export/import (CSV/Markdown), error handling, and unit/integration tests. Out of scope: SOC2 compliance, multi-region hosting, enterprise SSO/SCIM, mobile apps, template marketplace. Provide Docker Compose for local dev, CI pipeline, basic monitoring, and tests covering API, automations, and search.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Partly verdict base52
- An open-source build was found+5
- 5 cited sources+3
- Price verified on pricing page+3
- 3/3 assessment runs agreed+4
- Hard moats found in the evidence-3
- Evidence score64
The base comes from the verdict. Everything under it is a check that either happened or did not, and each one is a fact frozen in this record rather than a judgement made at render time — so the same evidence always produces the same number.
How scoring works →Cited sources · 5
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productFibery — Operating system for orgs run by nerds
- official pricingPricing — Fibery
- official productProduct discovery and development platform — Fibery
- open sourceONLYOFFICE/CommunityServer
- open sourcezmister2016/MrDoc
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
