gridcraft
GridCraft: an open-source, clean-room spreadsheet (Microsoft Excel-style) in pure Rust. By ArtCraft.
The Lens
By Erik Loyd, SaaS CEO and former COO/CFO of an AWS Premier Partner.
Updated Oct 2026
GridCraft is an Excel lookalike written from scratch in Rust: ribbon, formula bar, 500+ worksheet functions including XLOOKUP, LET and LAMBDA, PivotTables, charts and conditional formatting, with .xlsx as its native file format. It's free under MIT or Apache 2.0 on Mac, Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and the web.
No server. Download a signed installer or host the web build anywhere static. Old .xls workbooks open with their values and formulas but lose formatting. A command line tool and an MCP server let an AI agent read ranges, write cells and build charts.
Solo users doing budgets or quick analysis without Microsoft 365: free and worth a look. Analysts and finance teams: not yet. The maintainers rate it about 50% ready for real work, charts lose their type and options on round trip, 100 MB workbooks don't open, and nobody has confirmed Excel opens its files without a repair prompt. No VBA, no Power Query. LibreOffice Calc is the mature free option.
The catch: a spreadsheet that's quietly wrong is worse than none. GridCraft went public in October 2026, ships a release every few days and is largely written by AI agents. Check totals before anything reaches a client.
Free vs Self-Hosted vs Paid
fully freeFree: Everything. Dual licensed MIT OR Apache-2.0, no account, no subscription, no licence server. The ArtCraft logos are trademarked and must be removed from modified builds you distribute.
Self-hosted: Nothing to host. Desktop builds for macOS (universal DMG, signed and notarized), Windows (x64, arm64 and 32-bit MSI or portable zip, code-signed), Linux (AppImage, deb, rpm, Flatpak, tarball on x86_64 and aarch64, plus riscv64) and FreeBSD, plus a WebAssembly build for any static web server. Command line tool and MCP server included. XLSB and ODS files import as values only.
Paid: None for GridCraft. The same team sells ArtCraft, a separate AI image and video studio on monthly credits; it unlocks nothing here. Versus Microsoft 365, the maintainers put GridCraft at about 50% ready for real work, with VBA out of scope and no Power Query, so it replaces Excel only for simple sheets today.
Free under MIT or Apache 2.0 with no paid tier. Fine for personal sheets; not safe for workbooks you exchange with Excel users until .xlsx output is proven on real files.
What to do by team size
- Solo
- free; fine for budgets and quick analysis without Microsoft 365
- Small team
- free to try, but keep Excel or LibreOffice Calc for shared workbooks
- Medium team
- not ready: no VBA, no Power Query, no co-authoring
- Large team
- not ready for finance or macro-driven workflows; revisit after beta
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Trust Signals
License: MIT OR Apache-2.0
ArtCraft logos are trademarked; forks must remove them.
Commercial use: ✓ Yes
About
- Owner
- ArtCraft (Organization)
- Stars
- 6,280
- Forks
- 2,929
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