A Gigasheet alternative
Gigasheet is cloud-first: your file uploads to their infrastructure and a server does the work. For truly massive files a server is the honest answer, and theirs is good at it. This page is about where the line sits.
Fair is fair: what Gigasheet does well
Scale that a browser cannot reach. Multi-gigabyte files, billions of cells, work that keeps running while you close the laptop. None of that is available in a tab, and no amount of clever WebAssembly changes the fact that a browser has one machine's memory and a tab's lifetime.
Server-side also means shared. A colleague can open the same view, a link points at a real thing, and the state does not live in one person's browser. If your work is collaborative, that is a structural advantage rather than a feature we could add.
Where the two differ
| ExploreMyData | Gigasheet | |
|---|---|---|
| Architecture | Entirely in the browser tab; there is no server to send a file to | Cloud-first: files upload to their infrastructure |
| The size question | 1 GB hard cap, confirmation above 100 MB. Past that, a browser is not the tool and we say so | Built for files far larger than a browser can hold |
| Sensitive data | Nothing to approve: the bytes never leave the machine, and the network tab shows it | Uploading regulated data to any third party may need security or compliance sign-off first |
| Accounts and price | No account, no tier, ad-supported | Account required; free tier with paid plans at the time of writing |
Competitor details are general and may change; verify current capabilities and pricing on their site. Statements about ExploreMyData are testable here, right now.
How to tell which case you are in
Three questions, and they settle it faster than a feature comparison.
- How big is the file, actually? Under a few hundred megabytes, a browser handles it and there is no reason to upload anything. Above a gigabyte, be honest: a browser is not the tool.
- Can the data leave? If it is regulated, personal or under contract, the approval process for uploading it usually costs more time than the analysis. That is the whole argument, and it has nothing to do with features.
- Does anyone else need this view? If yes, a server is the right shape. Our state lives in one browser on one machine, deliberately.
I used Gigasheet for X. Where is that here?
| There | Here |
|---|---|
| Opening a file too big for Excel | The workbench, up to 1 GB, parsed off the main thread |
| Filtering and grouping millions of rows | SQL in the browser, full DuckDB |
| Joining two large files | CSV Merger, or a Join step in the pipeline |
| Splitting a file into manageable parts | CSV Splitter |
| Profiling a large file's columns | CSV Profiler |
The honest limit
I would rather lose a visitor than have them fight a tab with a four-gigabyte file. If that is your situation, upload it to a service built for it, or install DuckDB locally and query the file where it already is. Both are better than the browser, and saying so costs nothing.