Introducing Alephgrid: room for every row
Spreadsheets are the most successful data tool ever made, and they stop working the moment your
data gets big. Databases handle the big data and stop working the moment you want to touch it —
format a column, write =SUMIFS(...), drag a fill handle.
Alephgrid is our attempt to remove that trade-off. It’s an open-source (Apache-2.0) spreadsheet that opens CSV and Parquet files with hundreds of millions of rows, keeps them scrollable and editable in your browser, and puts an ordinary, Excel-compatible spreadsheet right next to them — with formulas that can read the big tables directly.
How it works
Section titled “How it works”One Rust binary with the UI embedded. Every workbook is a DuckDB file on your machine. Opening a workbook reads nothing into memory: the grid requests only the rows on screen, sorts build a permutation instead of a copy, and calculated columns compute only what you look at.
Sheets run on IronCalc, an Excel-compatible engine, so
XLOOKUP, SUMIFS, dynamic arrays, LET and LAMBDA behave the way you expect. And a sheet
formula like =SUMIFS(orders[amount], orders[region], A2) compiles to one query over the whole
table — not one lookup per row.
What’s in the first release
Section titled “What’s in the first release”v0.1.0 is being prepared now. It ships sheets with formatting, charts, comments and XLSX round-trip; big tables with sort, filters, calculated columns and the Analyze pane; reusable functions in sheet-formula, SQL or sandboxed Python form; an optional SQL workspace; teams with spaces, roles, SSO, quotas, audit and backups; and read-only MCP access so AI agents can query a workbook with a content-hashed receipt for every result.
There are no seats, tiers or paywalls. Export, sign-in, teams — everything is free.
Try it today
Section titled “Try it today”Until binaries ship, you can build from source in a few minutes (plus one DuckDB compile):
git clone https://github.com/alephgrid/alephgrid && cd alephgrid(cd web && npm install && npm run build)cargo build --release./target/release/alephgrid --demo-rows 10000000Follow the releases page for v0.1.0, and if something breaks, an issue with a reproducible file is the most valuable thing you can send us.