Budibase looks really impressive, basically a GUI frontend builder for postgres and its open source. Haven't actually deployed it, but played with the GUI builder and its nice.
There's a few other similar ones out there too like Baserow [2], Appsmith [3] and nocodb [4].
Finally, if you wanted a step up, then I guess supabase [5] would be the next one up but its more like "I just want to write front end and have auth, database, API and storage taken care of for me"
But none of these really give you that all-in-one database and front-end via files like Access did and its a damn shame. Yeah I know Access lead to some god-awful applications, but honestly the people complaining about shadow IT don't realize that its inevitable if IT isn't fixing people's problems. You just need to be clear that if the business unit goes down that path, they're on their own. So if the guy who built your crazy Excel VBA app is gone, don't expect that to be picked up by others just because its super important. But, if it is in fact that important, then its probably a prime candidate for actual development work, so the duct-taped together things do end up being sort of testbeds for whats actually important.
The whole lowcode-nocode shtick is a bit oversold, but one good aspect of it is that if you allow for an easy onboarding sandbox for the type of person who would otherwise make an Excel VBA app, at least some of these platforms have sandboxes with guardrails and other compliance stuff you can apply.
At least Access has a sound model underneath. Excel is nothing but a damn grid, while Access has tables, keys and constraints _and_ a visual GUI builder on top of those. The development environment was an only slightly pared-down Visual Basic but it was fully integrated in the rest of the GUI, while VBA always felt like it was tacked on the rest of the application.
There's a few other similar ones out there too like Baserow [2], Appsmith [3] and nocodb [4].
Finally, if you wanted a step up, then I guess supabase [5] would be the next one up but its more like "I just want to write front end and have auth, database, API and storage taken care of for me"
But none of these really give you that all-in-one database and front-end via files like Access did and its a damn shame. Yeah I know Access lead to some god-awful applications, but honestly the people complaining about shadow IT don't realize that its inevitable if IT isn't fixing people's problems. You just need to be clear that if the business unit goes down that path, they're on their own. So if the guy who built your crazy Excel VBA app is gone, don't expect that to be picked up by others just because its super important. But, if it is in fact that important, then its probably a prime candidate for actual development work, so the duct-taped together things do end up being sort of testbeds for whats actually important.
The whole lowcode-nocode shtick is a bit oversold, but one good aspect of it is that if you allow for an easy onboarding sandbox for the type of person who would otherwise make an Excel VBA app, at least some of these platforms have sandboxes with guardrails and other compliance stuff you can apply.
[1] https://budibase.com/ [2] https://baserow.io/ [3] https://www.appsmith.com/ [4] https://github.com/nocodb/nocodb [5] https://supabase.com/