I've been using TablePlus for years and honestly I really liked it. It's quick, it looks clean and it never got in my way much. But there was one bit of friction that kept nagging at me on the free plan. The two open tab limit. You only get a couple of connections open at a time, so the moment I wanted a third database open alongside the two I already had, I'd hit the wall and have to close one down first. On its own it's a tiny thing. Day after day though, when you're bouncing between a few databases at once, it really starts to grate.
So I gave Beekeeper Studio a proper go and I've fully switched over. The community edition is open source and free. There's no tab limit hanging over me, so straight away that little daily annoyance was gone.
The UI is lovely
First thing that got me is just how nice it looks. It's clean and calm and everything sits where you'd expect it to. The dark theme is easy on the eyes for a full day of work, the table list down the left is tidy and the whole thing feels light rather than crammed with buttons. I know that sounds like a small thing, but when a tool is where you spend most of your day, the way it looks and feels genuinely matters.
Rows as JSON in the sidebar
My favourite feature so far is the row detail view. You click on any row in a table and the right sidebar renders the whole record as nicely formatted JSON. That's it, but it's such a good little quality of life win. Instead of squinting across a wide table and scrolling sideways to line a value up with its column, the entire row is laid out top to bottom in one readable block. For rows with a lot of columns or ones that have JSON columns of their own, it's so much easier to actually read what you're looking at. I use it constantly now.
The other bits I've been enjoying
A few other things have made the switch feel worth it:
- The SQL editor has proper autocomplete, so it suggests your table and column names as you type and you spend a lot less time second guessing what something was called.
- Query history and saved queries mean the thing I ran last week is still sitting there waiting. The ones I run all the time I can pin so they're one click away.
- You can pin the tables you care about to the top of the sidebar, which keeps the handful you actually use out of a list of hundreds.
- It's cross platform and handles every database I touch, so it's the one tool whether I'm in Postgres, MySQL or SQLite.
None of these are revolutionary on their own. Together though they add up to a tool that just gets out of my way, which is exactly what I want from a database client.
If you're on TablePlus and keep bumping into that tab limit like I was, Beekeeper Studio is well worth a look. Grab the community edition, open more than two connections just because you can and click a row to watch it turn into JSON. Happy coding!