Glide App Builder: Honest Review, Pricing, Pros, Cons & Best Alternatives (2026)

Glide has been one of the most popular no-code app builders since it launched in 2018. It lets you turn a spreadsheet into a working app without writing any code — and for internal business tools, it’s genuinely impressive.

But here’s what most reviews won’t tell you: Glide builds Progressive Web Apps (PWAs), not native mobile apps. That distinction matters more than you’d think, especially if you’re building something consumer-facing or plan to ship through the App Store.

In this review, we’ll break down exactly what Glide does well, where it falls short, what it actually costs when you scale, and who should consider a different approach entirely.

What Is Glide?

Glide is a no-code platform that turns spreadsheets — Google Sheets, Excel, Airtable, or Glide’s own tables — into functional business apps. You connect your data source, customize the layout with drag-and-drop components, and publish a web-based app that works on any device.

It was founded in 2018, backed by Y Combinator, and has become a go-to tool for non-technical teams that need internal tools fast. Think inventory trackers, CRM dashboards, project management boards, field service apps — basically, anything that lives on a spreadsheet today but would work better as an app.

Glide’s Key Features

Spreadsheet-to-app conversion: This is Glide’s signature move. Connect a Google Sheet or Airtable base, and Glide generates a working app with lists, detail views, and forms automatically. If your data already lives in a spreadsheet, you can have a basic app running in minutes.

40+ pre-built components: Charts, forms, buttons, maps, image pickers, signature fields, and more. You don’t need to build UI from scratch — you drag components onto the canvas and configure them visually.

Computed columns and relations: Glide lets you create formula-based columns and relationships between tables, similar to VLOOKUP in spreadsheets but more powerful. This is where Glide starts to feel like a real database-backed application.

Automations and workflows: The Business plan unlocks workflows — automated sequences that trigger when data changes. For example: when a new row is added, send an email via SendGrid, update a Slack channel, and log the event. You can chain multiple steps together.

Integrations: Glide connects with 35+ services including Stripe, Twilio, SendGrid, Slack, Microsoft Teams, DocuSign, and more. On the Enterprise plan, you get access to 100+ data sources including HubSpot, Salesforce, and PostgreSQL.

AI features: Glide has added AI-powered columns that can classify data, extract information, or generate text — useful for automating data processing without leaving the platform.

Glide Pricing: What It Actually Costs

This is where things get nuanced. Glide’s pricing looks simple on the surface, but the “updates” model catches a lot of people off guard.

The hidden cost: updates. Every time data changes or syncs from an external source (Google Sheets, Airtable), it counts as an “update.” If you exceed your monthly limit, your users get locked out until you upgrade or buy more updates at $0.02 each.

Here’s the catch: if you use Glide’s own tables instead of external data sources, updates don’t count against your limit. This sounds convenient, but it effectively pushes you toward Glide’s proprietary data storage — creating vendor lock-in. Once your app is deeply integrated with Glide Tables, migrating to another platform becomes painful.

Per-user costs at scale. The Business plan includes 30 users. Each additional user costs $5–6/month. That might seem trivial, but do the math for a customer-facing app: 500 users would cost roughly $2,500/month on top of the base plan. For internal tools with small teams, this is fine. For consumer apps, it’s a dealbreaker.

What Glide Does Well

Let’s be fair — Glide is excellent for specific use cases:

Internal business tools. If your team is tracking inventory, managing field operations, running an approval workflow, or replacing a clunky spreadsheet process, Glide is hard to beat. It turns a 2-week development project into a 2-hour setup.

Speed of prototyping. Need to validate an idea fast? Glide lets you go from spreadsheet to working app in under an hour. For MVPs and proof-of-concepts, this speed is genuinely valuable.

Non-technical teams. If you understand spreadsheets, you can build with Glide. There’s no learning curve for code, APIs, or databases. A marketing manager or operations lead can build their own tools without bugging the engineering team.

Data-heavy applications. Because Glide is fundamentally built around structured data, it handles apps with lots of tables, filters, and computed fields really well. Dashboards, reporting tools, and data entry apps are its sweet spot.

Where Glide Falls Short

Now for the stuff that matters if you’re evaluating Glide for anything beyond internal tools:

You Can’t Publish to the App Store

This is the biggest limitation, and it’s not a minor detail. Glide builds Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) — essentially web pages that look like apps. They run in the browser, not natively on the device.

What this means in practice: you cannot list your Glide app on the Apple App Store or Google Play Store. Users can “install” it via a home screen shortcut, but it won’t appear in app store search results, you can’t send push notifications reliably, and you miss out on the discovery and credibility that comes with being in the store.

If you’re building a consumer-facing product — a marketplace, a social app, a fitness tracker, a delivery service — this is a non-starter. App store presence isn’t optional for consumer apps; it’s how people find and trust your product.

Limited Design Customization

Glide’s templates are clean and functional, but you’re locked into predefined layouts. There’s no pixel-level control, no custom CSS, and no ability to create novel UI patterns. If your designer hands you a polished Figma mockup, you won’t be able to replicate it in Glide.

For internal tools where aesthetics don’t matter much, this is fine. For consumer-facing products where design is a competitive advantage, it’s a real constraint.

Performance Feels Like a Web App

Because Glide apps are PWAs, they don’t have access to native device APIs the way a real mobile app does. Animations feel less smooth, transitions are slower, and features like camera access, GPS, and offline functionality are limited compared to native apps.

Users can tell the difference. If you’ve ever used an app that felt “off” — a little sluggish, not quite right — there’s a good chance it was a web app pretending to be a native one.

The Update Model Gets Expensive

As mentioned above, the update-based pricing can balloon quickly if your app syncs with external data sources frequently. Apps with real-time data, frequent writes, or high user activity will burn through updates fast.

No HIPAA Compliance

If you’re in healthcare, finance, or any regulated industry dealing with sensitive data, Glide isn’t compliant. This rules it out for a significant number of enterprise use cases.

Complex Logic Has a Ceiling

Glide handles basic workflows well, but if your app needs nested conditionals, complex loops, or sophisticated business logic, you’ll hit a wall. At that point, you’re looking at Bubble (which has its own learning curve) or custom development.

Who Is Glide Best For?

Glide is an excellent choice if:

• You’re building internal tools for a small-to-medium team (under 50 users)
• Your app is primarily about organizing and displaying data from spreadsheets
• You need something live in hours, not weeks
• Design flexibility and app store distribution aren’t priorities
• Your budget is comfortable at $199+/month for the Business plan

Glide is NOT the right choice if:

• You need to publish to the Apple App Store or Google Play
• You’re building a consumer-facing product where design and performance matter
• You need native mobile features (push notifications, camera, GPS, offline)
• You expect hundreds or thousands of users (per-user pricing gets expensive)
• You’re in a regulated industry requiring HIPAA or similar compliance

The Alternative: When You Need a Real Native App

If you’ve read this far and realized Glide’s web-app approach doesn’t fit your needs, you’re probably looking for something that builds actual native mobile apps — the same technology that powers Instagram, Discord, and Airbnb.

That’s exactly what RapidNative does. Instead of generating a Progressive Web App from a spreadsheet, RapidNative uses AI to generate real React Native code from a text prompt. The difference is significant:

RapidNative isn’t trying to replace Glide — they solve different problems. If you need an internal inventory tracker built in 2 hours, use Glide. If you need a real mobile app that lives on the App Store and feels native to users, RapidNative is built for that.

Final Verdict

Glide is a genuinely great tool — for the right use case. It’s the best spreadsheet-to-app platform on the market, and for internal business tools, it’s nearly unbeatable on speed and simplicity.

But if you need native app performance, App Store distribution, or full design control, Glide’s PWA architecture is fundamentally the wrong fit. No amount of customization will turn a web app into a native one.

The question isn’t whether Glide is good (it is). The question is whether it’s right for what you’re building. If your app needs to feel, perform, and distribute like a real mobile app — it’s worth looking at tools that build native from the ground up.

Ready to build a real native mobile app? Try RapidNative free — describe your app idea in plain English and get a working React Native app in minutes.