I blame my entire self-hosting hobby trajectory on a single piece of software that I used over a decade ago and fell absolutely in love with:
If any of you have ever worked in collision repair (body shop, insurance, estimating, etc), you know what I’m talking about. The user interface was essentially - you open the program and are presented with a list of all the vehicles that have visited your shop, with some basic identifying info including the current status (estimate only, in repair, etc). You select a vehicle and open it up, and you’re presented with everything related to that vehicle, including estimates, workorders, POs, parts, service time, repair time, photos, ties to LKQ and other used parts vendors for pricing, and a host of other useful shit - all separated neatly into tabs and clickable links.
I’ve been going mad trying to find something in the FOSS world that comes even close to this in order to keep track of my own projects, inlcuding vehicles, computer builds, other random shit. So far though, I have found only kanban boards (which are missing key project management features), or full-fledged CRM suites with way more added bloat than I will ever use.
I’m not looking for FOSS software with a 1:1 parity to CCC One; but there has got to be SOMETHING in the FOSS world that at least has some semblance of this capability. I use Planka right now, and it’s fine, but there is just so much left to be desired.
Am I just expecting too much? If I am, please tell me. Or maybe help me better utilize the tools I already have.
Thank you SO SO MUCH to all who contribute to the FOSS community, you guys are serious rock stars. I barely understand if
and for
loops…
give erpnext and nocodb a testride
You could probably approximate something similar with Odoo. It is a big ERP, but all modular, so you can just remove the parts that are too complex.
I’ve come across Odoo a few times, but I don’t remember if I actually went for a demo or not… I’ll check it out again. Thanks!
So…CCC seems to be a very basic inventory management solution. What this generally describes is a system compromised of a database with a front-ends that makes sense of whatever the particular project is (car repair), and provides an easy to interact with the database.
What you’re using now is simply for workflow management of projects in a simplified way, which is probably not what you want.
So you need a database, and you also want an easy way to interface with it, so you can check out the plethora of inventory management solutions in the FOSS space, but if you want something pretty simple that you can more easily customize for your needs and workflow, have a look at the FOSS alternatives to Airtable like nocobase. You set up a simple data structure, then can slap together quick forms to work inside of with whatever fields and data you choose. Dead simple, but very extensible.
Edit: Also check out Baserow maybe
Have you checked nocode platforms/databases? It’s basically a cross section of a super powerful excel and a database manager. You can set up the way you want, link records from different tables, add images, files to “rows”, like excel on steroids. You don’t have to understand SQL at all, that’s why it’s called “no code”.
I use nocodb. Tried baserow before, but I didn’t like that a lot of basic features are not available in the foss version, in nocodb only some bells and whistles are behind a paywall and not available in the self hosted version
They are also called airtable clones, as airtable was the first well known platform like these.
Some other similars exist: https://alternativeto.net/software/airtable/?platform=self-hosted&feature=database-management
I’m known as the “spreadsheet” guy at my work since I’ve done a lot of upgrades to our existing tools and or made new ones. I’m learning coding just doing that through app script and am toying around with some game Dev ideas in godot but this sounds super interesting. Thanks for sharing.
Have you checked nocode platforms/databases?
I can’t say that I have, honestly. It never really clicked until now that a database platform is essentially what I’m looking for 😅
NocoDB looks promising! Doesn’t look like they have any live demos to try out, but I can work with that. Thanks!
You can try the hosted version here: https://app.nocodb.com/