CheqqThe Cheqq alternative to Google Sheets
When the sheet becomes the system, stop writing Apps Script.
Google Sheets is where most operations begin, and it should be. Cheqq is where they go when the tab count climbs and someone starts writing scripts — typed records, real workflows, a published app, and your Sheets still read and written from any step.
What Google Sheets is forThe best place in the world to start. Free, instantly collaborative, in everyone's browser already, and flexible enough that a sheet can become almost anything before anybody notices it has.
Where that sheet goes next. The same data as typed records, the manual steps as deterministic workflows, the form and the status page as published apps — and Sheets connected as an integration so nobody has to abandon it.
Why people start looking
Nothing here is a knock on Google Sheets. These are the points at which one product stops being the right shape for the job, whichever product it is.
You are writing Apps Script now
The trigger nobody documented, the quota you hit at the worst time, the script that broke when a column moved. It works until the person who wrote it is on holiday.
Eleven tabs and a lookup between each
The sheet turned into a relational database without ever being designed as one, and the joins are VLOOKUPs held together by hope.
Sharing is all or nothing
Protected ranges and hidden tabs are conventions, not enforcement. Anyone with edit access can see everything, and anyone with view access can copy it.
The research column is a person
Someone opens each row, looks something up, and types it in. It is the slowest column and the one that most looks like it should not be manual.
Cheqq vs Google Sheets
Row by row, in plain terms. Where Google Sheets is the stronger answer, the row says so.
Google SheetsDescribe what you need and it is built, or import the sheet you already have.
Free, open in a tab, and everyone already knows it. Nothing beats it for the first version of anything.
Records sync live — an edit appears for everyone with access as it happens, and each row records who last changed it and when. Roles per collaborator, plus published apps for people with no account at all.
Real-time multi-cursor editing that set the standard for the whole category, in a document anyone can be handed a link to.
Typed fields, two-way relations, formulas, rollups and seven view types over the same records.
Cells and tabs, with lookups standing in for relations.
Give a column a job and it runs across every row with sources attached, a price quoted first, and manual edits never overwritten.
Formulas and add-ons; research columns stay manual.
Six trigger types, branching, loops, retries, sandboxed code and human approval steps with escalation — with a readable run history.
Apps Script, which is powerful and is also code you now own and maintain.
Published apps expose only the fields listed in a binding the server enforces on every request.
Sheet and range sharing, enforced at document level.
Decks and documents generated from the records, edited directly, shared to a published link that stays pinned to the version you chose — the monthly report becomes a workflow step.
Docs and Slides are separate files you keep in sync by hand, or with more Apps Script.
Google Sheets is a first-class integration — read from and write to a sheet from any workflow step.
It is the sheet.
Based on each product's publicly documented capabilities. Both move fast — if something here is out of date, tell us and we will fix it.
What you would build instead
Not features to evaluate — sentences you could type on your first afternoon, and what comes back.
Replace the trigger nobody understands.
That Apps Script running on a time trigger becomes a workflow you can read: the steps in order, what each one produced, and where it stopped. It retries, it escalates, and it does not silently die at a quota.
Let people submit without touching the sheet.
The tab where the team pastes requests becomes a page at its own address. It writes into your records, shows people only their own submissions, and cannot expose the tabs beside it because it was never the same document.
When to stay with Google Sheets
We would rather you picked the right tool than picked ours. These are the cases where Google Sheets is the better answer.
- Ad-hoc and collaborativeThree people in one document working something out live. Sheets is the right tool for that and there is nothing to fix.
- It is freeFor a lot of jobs, free and already-open beats better. That is a legitimate reason to stay.
- The sheet is small and settledIf it fits on one tab and nobody is writing scripts against it, moving it somewhere more structured is effort without a payoff.
- Everything else is GoogleDeep in Drive, Docs and Apps Script, with an admin setup to match — that integration is tight and worth counting.
Moving across, gradually
You do not have to switch in one go — most people run both for a while and let the Google Sheets side shrink.
Import one tab
The one that hurts most. Cheqq infers a type per column, you correct what it got wrong, and the rows become typed records.
Describe what the script did
In words, not code. You read the compiled steps before switching it on, and the run history tells you what happened every time after that.
Keep the Sheet if people like it
Connect Google Sheets as an integration and have a workflow write back to it. Nobody has to change what they open in the morning.
Switching from Google Sheets
Can Cheqq read and write my existing Google Sheets?
Yes. Google Sheets is a supported integration, so a workflow step can read rows from a sheet and write back to it. A lot of people keep the sheet as the surface their team likes and move the work behind it into Cheqq.
What happens to my Apps Script?
It becomes a workflow you can read rather than code you maintain — with retries, approval gates and a per-run event history. Where you genuinely need code, workflows have a sandboxed code step.
Do my formulas still work?
Formula, lookup and rollup fields cover what operational sheets use. What changes is that a link between tables is a real relation rather than a VLOOKUP that breaks when a column moves.
How do permissions differ from sharing a sheet?
Sheet sharing is document-level, so protected ranges are a convention. A Cheqq app is bound to a named list of fields and the server rejects any request outside it — the app cannot read a field you did not list, whatever it asks for.
Comparing something else?
vs SmartSuite
vs NocoDB
vs Teable
vs ExcelKeep the sheet. Move the work.
Import the tab that hurts most and describe what the script was supposed to do. Free to start.
Start free