Free Microsoft Access al­tern­at­ives

Pro­cessing data is an important part of business life. Whether it’s a customer register, your private address book, ac­count­ing, or inventory: with di­git­al­isa­tion ever in­creas­ing, it is becoming more and more important to organise and manage records as quickly, flexibly, and clearly as possible. This is achieved using database man­age­ment systems (DBMS) that organise data and display it (e.g., a list of contacts’ locations sorted by postcode).

Microsoft Access (also known as MS Access) is a popular DBMS. The programme is used in many small to medium-sized companies as well as by private users. The advantage over other DBMS: pro­gram­ming skills are not required to operate Microsoft Access. In addition to MS Access, there are other tried and tested database man­age­ment systems that enable you to work in a similar way — some of them are also com­pat­ible with other operating systems such as macOS or GNU/Linux. There are even some free al­tern­at­ives to Microsoft Access. We provide you with three of the best Microsoft Access al­tern­at­ives that you can download for free.

But why would you need to look for an al­tern­at­ive to Microsoft Access? Its pop­ular­ity would suggest that it’s a very capable and well-developed DBMS. In fact, MS Access does a fair amount of ad­vant­ages — it is suitable for beginners as well as those who have more ex­per­i­ence dealing with databases. However, it is only available for Windows and comes at a cost.

The software is par­tic­u­larly suited to beginners in database man­age­ment: you don’t need any pro­gram­ming skills for producing simple databases since this is also re­l­at­ively easy using the graphical user interface. Various as­sist­ants and templates (e.g., for contact ad­min­is­tra­tion, project tasks, etc.) make everything a lot easier. However, it is possible to freely define the data fields and to adapt the data model’s char­ac­ter­ist­ics to specific re­quire­ments. Data sets or tables can be created, edited, and linked with each other quickly and easily in MS Access. If you want to use the programme to implement extensive ap­plic­a­tions, there’s no way you can get around pro­gram­ming with VBA (Visual Basic for Ap­plic­a­tions) — although the effort required is usually less than with other database man­age­ment systems. Using macros, you can also automate various tasks re­l­at­ively easily.

It’s not only creating or ad­min­is­trat­ing data sets that is often easier with MS Access than with other database man­age­ment systems, but it’s also easier to analyse them. With the help of various as­sist­ance functions, it’s possible to analyse databases that have already been created, request databases according to certain char­ac­ter­ist­ics, and also create reports without further ado.

By saving an MS Access database in a single file, you can easily share it with other people or transfer it to other devices. If you want to use the database in another DBMS (or you want to open other database files in MS Access), there are many in­ter­faces at your disposal. In addition to other MS Office file formats (like Excel), you can import and export various other formats, e.g., ODBC databases (MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Post­gr­eSQL, etc.), HTML documents, XML files as well as Dbase files. You can easily move tables and forms from one programme to another.

The software’s sim­pli­city also has its downside. Microsoft Access’ database system is far less powerful compared to a server database system: MS Access is more suitable for im­ple­ment­ing lean databases, which don’t have several hundred thousand entries (a server DBMS is used for this). Pro­cessing large amounts of data takes a lot of juice with MS Access - hence the long loading times. This is the downside of a file-based database: the database is searched for the complete file, meaning that the larger it is, the longer it will take. The programme is also limited in capacity, depending on the size of the database: the maximum file size is 2GB. However, as long as you don’t store large amounts of images, this lim­it­a­tion shouldn’t be a problem. There are also sig­ni­fic­antly fewer functions available compared to an average server DBMS. In addition, there are short­com­ings when several people are using the programme at once, compared to a DBMS based com­pletely on SQL: on the one hand, the SQL standard works with a much more dif­fer­en­ti­ated au­thor­isa­tion concept than MS Access, but on the other hand, the Microsoft programme en­coun­ters per­form­ance problems quite quickly when a database is being used sim­ul­tan­eously by more than one or two people. Even with just a handful of users, Microsoft Access will start to run no­tice­ably slower. At around ten users, the programme has often reached its limit. MS Access is only available for Windows operating systems and was an integral part of the Microsoft Office Suite in the past. After in­tro­du­cing the Cloud version of the Office Suite, it started to be released in various Microsoft 365 plans. In addition, you can also purchase the programme in­di­vidu­ally. For­tu­nately, users who still have a classic version of MS Office installed on their Windows computer (as opposed to the Cloud version of Microsoft 365) can still install this programme. This is because Microsoft hasn’t made any major changes to the programme for a long time. The current MS Access 2016, as well as the 2010 and 2013 versions, are best suited for typical database tasks.

Microsoft Access as a desktop DBMS doesn’t provide the same op­por­tun­it­ies that server database man­age­ment systems do. But MS Access isn’t aiming to compete with pro­grammes like these: it’s because the server DBMS is on another scale among database man­age­ment systems and conforms to a different target group (the operation and setup of the connected server both require SQL knowledge). Microsoft (with the MS SQL server) offers in­de­pend­ent software in this class of database man­age­ment systems while ac­know­ledging MS Access is a product for users who are less tech savvy.

If you are looking for Microsoft Access al­tern­at­ives, you have to compare the DBMS with other desktop database man­age­ment systems. One of the most widely used al­tern­at­ive pro­grammes is FileMaker, which operates on Windows, macOS and even iOS. However, FileMaker is paid software and, therefore, not a free Microsoft Access al­tern­at­ive. The following pro­grammes can be used free of charge and without any prior SQL knowledge. This, in turn, dis­tin­guishes them from open source systems such as MySQL, MariaDB, and Post­gr­eSQL. All three database man­age­ment systems — just like MS Access – are not designed to work with very large chunks of data since the database is saved in a single file.

The bottom line is that there is only really one free al­tern­at­ive to Microsoft Access in database man­age­ment that offers roughly the same pos­sib­il­it­ies: Lib­reOf­fice/Open­Of­fice Base. But even with Base, you have to accept that there will be a few drawbacks compared to MS Access, es­pe­cially regarding the database’s request pos­sib­il­it­ies and the general func­tion­al range. In addition, MS Access appears to be more stable and reliable: the programme crashes very rarely and doesn’t need fixing often.

Glom and for the most part, Kexi, are more likely to use the database frontend concept, which ad­di­tion­ally requires a database man­age­ment system to be installed or at least col­lab­or­ated with. This is useful because it solves some common problems as­so­ci­ated with classic desktop database systems and provides a stable and multi-user database. However, the range of functions and the pos­sib­il­it­ies of the two database man­age­ment systems are really quite limited, meaning that the two pro­grammes are only really suitable for a small number of tasks.

The advantage that MS Access has over the free, file-based database man­age­ment systems is, among other things, the long de­vel­op­ment period that the programme has already undergone as part of the MS Office Suite. Even though only a few new features have been in­tro­duced in recent versions, the software has been con­stantly improved since its release in the early 1990s and any errors en­countered have been fixed. FileMaker is the only (fee-based) programme that has a longer de­vel­op­ment history than the desktop database man­age­ment system from Microsoft. If you are looking for a fully developed desktop DBMS with a great variety of functions, you should consider pur­chas­ing Microsoft Access (or the FileMaker software for macOS).

It could be that the other pro­grammes are right for you; it just depends on your re­quire­ments and your operating system. Base from Lib­reOf­fice and Open­Of­fice has the largest range of features out of all the free al­tern­at­ives to Microsoft Access, followed by Kexi. On the other hand, Glom has the clearest frontend and is the easiest to use, thanks to its min­im­al­ist­ic layout. The type of software you go for can be dependent on how many user in­ter­faces to other database systems are available or whether full multi-user features are included. The final overview presents all the important features of the three desktop database man­age­ment systems that have been in­tro­duced in this article.