I tried Bika at least five times over the last six months. I planned to migrate everything from Airtable to Bika, but I had to cancel because key things still do not work the way they do in Airtable.
Here is what is breaking the experience for me:
You cannot use Rich Documents inside Forms.
Many field types are still marked “coming soon.”
Overall, it is not as smooth or reliable as Airtable.
I have seen this pattern before. When I bought Airtable, there were features on the roadmap that I waited for, but the roadmap never felt like it was moving.
Now with Bika, it feels like the same story. The roadmap is not being updated, and items marked “in progress” have been sitting there for 6+ months.
Support has been disappointing too. No one responded from Airtable, and no one is responding here either.
It feels like the same small dev team juggling multiple projects, without meaningful progress. It does not look like they have a dedicated full-time team behind it.
At this point, it feels like Jenga. The more I stack my data and workflows into Bika, the higher the risk that it breaks, or the product disappears, and then the next “new” tool replaces it.
That said, Bika is immensely complex software from a development perspective. Building something thoughtfully and correct is much more important than building it quickly imo. Fixing bugs and improving the foundation should generally take precedence over adding new features (unless they are features I requested!! ).
Over time it has noticeably improved and become more robust overall. If it’s noticeable at the surface level, it’s likely involved a lot of improvements under the hood. This appears to be confirmed by the changelog, which I wasn’t aware of until it was linked above.
I believe every bug I’ve submitted has been addressed and fixed. Fairly certain every topic I’ve posted here has been replied to by a team member also.
It’s very impressive as-is imo, just need to give the chefs more time to cook in order to support all the workflows we want, remove blockers etc. Personally, I’m super optimistic about Bika - it’s probably at the top of my ‘tools I am optimistic about’ list haha.
So does this mean the core team, the ones responsible for building the product as per the roadmap, are spending most of their time just fixing bugs?
A SaaS platform of this nature is expected to have a structured development setup. A core team focused on new features and roadmap execution, and a separate stream handling bug fixes and stability.
I have shared my view publicly here. Let us revisit this in the next six months.
My strong assumption is that we will still be dealing with the same limitations we see today.
Hi everyone, thanks for the open and honest discussion here. We’re reading through all of it carefully.
We want to be transparent about a few things. It’s true that progress on new features hasn’t met expectations. There are a couple of internal reasons behind this. Over the past period, more engineering resources were pulled toward AI Agent development, which took more focus than originally planned as we worked to keep up with how fast that space is moving. At the same time, some earlier iterations moved too quickly, which introduced stability and experience issues. The team is still paying down that technical debt, which is why recent release notes include a significant number of bug fixes. It can feel like a pullback after a fast run, and the frustration around that is completely understandable.
Looking ahead, we expect this adjustment phase to settle during Q1 next year. We also plan to update the roadmap in the near term so it better reflects what’s actively being worked on.
Thanks @brocksran for clearly sharing your experience, and thanks @Selven and @log for adding helpful context from different angles. Appreciate everyone here who took the time to speak up and share concrete feedback. It helps us prioritize what matters most.
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