Nobie
Shares rank 8 of 12 spreadsheets by recommenders
A free, native spreadsheet app that works with Excel xlsx files, evaluates formulas, and suits agents and humans. Critics say it lacks pivot table editing and some features.
A free, native spreadsheet app that works with Excel xlsx files, evaluates formulas, and suits agents and humans. Critics say it lacks pivot table editing and some features.
13 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 11
- criticize it
- 2
- approval share
- 85%
Recommended in 1 of 13 months
- November 2025: not recommended
- December 2025: not recommended
- January 2026: not recommended
- February 2026: not recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: not recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: not recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 11 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 5.5 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 1 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, not met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Free with no cost
“It costs us nothing to give people a great, computer-use friendly, native spreadsheet app”
Comment from 14 Jul 2026 in “Show HN: Nobie – an Excel-compatible runtime for agents and humans” “having zero marginal cost is nice and allows us to do things that others can't”
Comment from 13 Jul 2026 in “Show HN: Nobie – an Excel-compatible runtime for agents and humans” “Nobie is free and always will be for everything you can do in Excel.”
Comment from 13 Jul 2026 in “Show HN: Nobie – an Excel-compatible runtime for agents and humans” - Comment from 13 Jul 2026 in “Show HN: Nobie – an Excel-compatible runtime for agents and humans”
Excel-compatible xlsx formula evaluation
“Nobie runs the workbook like Excel would: it evaluates formulas, maintains workbook semantics through edits, renders the result, and reads and writes the file.”
Comment from 13 Jul 2026 in “Show HN: Nobie – an Excel-compatible runtime for agents and humans” “a massive amount of functionality in this thing that we're hoping will make the lives of everyone who needs to work with xlsx files better”
Comment from 13 Jul 2026 in “Show HN: Nobie – an Excel-compatible runtime for agents and humans” “making the desktop app and CLI hands down the best xlsx experience in the world”
Comment from 13 Jul 2026 in “Show HN: Nobie – an Excel-compatible runtime for agents and humans” Native Mac spreadsheet alternative to Numbers
“We were tired of the Mac being a second class experience for working with spreadsheets”
Comment from 13 Jul 2026 in “Show HN: Nobie – an Excel-compatible runtime for agents and humans” “It’s honestly welcoming to simply see a modern Numbers alternative”
Comment from 13 Jul 2026 in “Show HN: Nobie – an Excel-compatible runtime for agents and humans” “Keen to try this out, been avoiding to add any MS to my new mac”
Comment from 13 Jul 2026 in “Show HN: Nobie – an Excel-compatible runtime for agents and humans” Built for agents and computer use
“As far as I'm aware, Nobie is the the best spreadsheet for agentic use-cases explicitly because they don't have to guess anymore.”
Comment from 14 Jul 2026 in “Show HN: Nobie – an Excel-compatible runtime for agents and humans” “It costs us nothing to give people a great, computer-use friendly, native spreadsheet app”
Comment from 14 Jul 2026 in “Show HN: Nobie – an Excel-compatible runtime for agents and humans”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
No pivot table creation or editing
“The main deficiency we have right now is not letting people create / edit pivot tables.”
Comment from 13 Jul 2026 in “Show HN: Nobie – an Excel-compatible runtime for agents and humans” No refresh button for data queries
“However, there's no refresh button, so I need to spend time rewriting the query and tokens to retrieve data every month?”
Comment from 14 Jul 2026 in “Show HN: Nobie – an Excel-compatible runtime for agents and humans” Not fully featured for corporate use
“Without this feature, it's pretty much useless in a corporate environment.”
Comment from 14 Jul 2026 in “Show HN: Nobie – an Excel-compatible runtime for agents and humans” “it's not yet fully featured, but just to catalog a few things”
Comment from 15 Jul 2026 in “Show HN: Nobie – an Excel-compatible runtime for agents and humans”
Other spreadsheets people recommend
The four most recommended other spreadsheets, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Microsoft Excel | 339 | 292 | 54% | 12 | 30 yrs12 owners | — |
| Google Sheets | 92 | 54 | 63% | 12 | 1 yr3 owners | — |
| Lotus 1-2-3 | 34 | 2 | 94% | 8 | — | Approved |
| LibreOffice Calc | 32 | 18 | 64% | 10 | 2 yrs3 owners | — |
| NobieThis page | 11 | 2 | 85% | 1 | — | — |
What people said
24 of the 27 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“it's not yet fully featured, but just to catalog a few things”
“such a smart idea to build the excel runtime alternative”
“I think you'll be pleasantly surprised with how much functionality we have”
“Nobie will continue getting more customizable and programmable.”
“However, there's no refresh button, so I need to spend time rewriting the query and tokens to retrieve data every month?”
“Without this feature, it's pretty much useless in a corporate environment.”
“That is really cool and impressive! Fantastic job”
“As far as I'm aware, Nobie is the the best spreadsheet for agentic use-cases explicitly because they don't have to guess anymore.”
“It'll be vectorized, so you have infinite resolution on zoom for text.”
“It costs us nothing to give people a great, computer-use friendly, native spreadsheet app”
“having zero marginal cost is nice and allows us to do things that others can't”
“Nobie runs the workbook like Excel would: it evaluates formulas, maintains workbook semantics through edits, renders the result, and reads and writes the file.”
“We're fine if you just want a really good, free, spreadsheet tool”
“built from the ground up in rust, with the aim that it's much faster than Excel”
“We were tired of the Mac being a second class experience for working with spreadsheets”
“This is definitely giving of vibes like what Deno/Bun are to Nodejs, Nobie is to Excel.”
“It’s honestly welcoming to simply see a modern Numbers alternative”
“making the desktop app and CLI hands down the best xlsx experience in the world”
“We've put a lot of effort into making sure its a great experience.”
“Keen to try this out, been avoiding to add any MS to my new mac”
“The main deficiency we have right now is not letting people create / edit pivot tables.”
“I think this'll be really useful for for a lot of devs”
“a massive amount of functionality in this thing that we're hoping will make the lives of everyone who needs to work with xlsx files better”
“Nobie is free and always will be for everything you can do in Excel.”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.