Hello and happy holidays from everyone here at Grist Labs!
It was a big year for Grist. We gained more users than ever and shipped a bunch of features.
We also had the privilege of finding out how Grist is being used all over the world, from within the civil service to hobby groups to IT infrastructure management.
Highlights
- 🌌 Our GitHub stars went from 3.4 to 5.6k – a 60% increase!
- 🗣️ We were featured on Hacker News’ frontpage for the second time and got invaluable, unvarnished feedback as always.
- 🇫🇷 We had the privilege to present Grist alongside ANCT at NEC 2023 in Bordeaux, to talk about open source and no-code tools, and the digital commons.
- 💬 We launched our official Discord server to chat with our growing community.
Product milestones
Most importantly, Grist itself took a huge leap this year. Both internal work and community contributions have improved Grist drastically, not only polishing existing features but setting the groundwork for exciting developments (see some hints at the bottom of this post). Here are some highlights, limited to one per month:
January – we started our Weblate project, and thanks to dozens of contributors are up to 21 active translations.
February – we released the first version of Grist’s standalone Electron app.
March – the launch of one of our most popular templates – Flashcards.
April – we published our grist-static
repo, letting you host .grist
files without the full back-end.
May – Grist grows claws with better UI support for webhooks.
June – in what became known as “the summer of selectors”, we added highlights for selector rows and made other improvements to widget linking.
July – though not as exciting or trendy as selectors, we launched our AI Formula Assistant.
August – building on grist-static
– and in an effort to free the CSV – we released the Grist CSV Viewer.
September – the time finally came for us to release the official Grist calendar widget.
October – way too much happened this month, but let’s highlight formula lookups & shortcuts.
November – relational navigation within Grist got much easier with Record Cards.
December – (rumbling noise heard in the distance) forms … forms … FORMS! … *FORMS!*
Community contributions
One of the best parts of Grist’s open-source principles is working with others across the globe who understand what we’re trying to do. We’d like to shout out some of the many community contributions over the year that greatly enhance the product and bring us tremendous inspiration:
- @jperon‘s QR code widget, custom SQL selector widget, advanced search widget using
eval
, and – last but not least – his tireless Advent of Code Grist mastery shared on our Discord (in the#advent-of-code
channel). - @enthus1ast‘s app that periodically backs up Grist documents in SQLite, XLSX, and CSV file formats, Grist infrastructure monitoring system daemon, and Nim REST API client.
- Two custom calendar widgets from @ToJans and @wunter8 that helped direct us towards making our own. You two made it look easy! Calendars are surprisingly complicated!
- @johncant’s PostgreSQL Foreign Data Wrapper, which is a very neat tool that allows you to import and query Grist tables in PostgreSQL.
- Leonard_Gallion’s handy Python code that lets you download documents as .grist files.
- @CoverWhale Grist Go client, Gorist. (we’ll never get over the name)
- @inducer‘s trio of Grist utils:
- grist-availability: a tool to help with multi-person scheduling using the new calendar widget.
- grist-mailmerge: a batch emailer driven by a Grist table and a Jinja template.
- pygrist-mini: a tiny Grist API client for Python.
Finally, a huge thanks to our collaborators at ANCT for their many PRs, and to all of our Weblate translation contributors.
2024 – What’s coming next
Our GitHub roadmap is the best way to keep track of what we’re actually working on, but here are a few topics that we’re constantly thinking about:

Wait…what’s WYSIWYS? Ask us on Discord.
See you next year! 🫡
