I hear you, totally makes sense.
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Attio has a cleaner experience for email than Fibery: Send emails in Attio | Attio Help Center
We actually considered if we could use Attio as a replacement for Fibery at one point (when they first released custom objects). But, Relationships and Actions lack heavily, since it is more of a CRM and less of an OS like Fibery. Plus theyâre missing a formula field, which is crucial.
E-signature
Build this simple signing functionality into Fibery and you can have the $500/year we spend with them: https://esignatures.com/
Alternatively just build a nice one click integration with them. I currently use Zapier to integrate the two and its limited and brittle.
Happy to read that (except for the Coda people, I wouldnât like building something for years with a team and then you get to see it collapse from up-close)!
No weird merges for Fibery! Letâs just keep the party going and it will keep growing, I believe that 
You might be interested to know that my team has weaned off Slack thanks to Fiberyâs solid implementation of comments! And there is a a lot of work to be done with those stillâŚreason #1 we were able to use Fibery comments and ditch Slack - the usefulness of Indexing comments in search. Huge feature. Nobody of the âno-codeâ guys (feels like that expressions is old school now) do that - Coda, Notion, AirTable, etc. Newer things like Anytype and Tana donât even have comments!!
We do interestingly use the slack integration to solve part of the mobile issue - simply picking up notifications from the inbox in Slack, and reading the summary, before diving back into Fibery. Very useful for keeping up with whatâs going on while away from your desk. Doesnât allow you to respond, but at least you can see what is going on while we wait on a mobile solution. But literally we do nothing else in Slack! All meaningful conversations are conducted in Fibery (or if need be just plain old text messaging!)
And just to stay on topic, would love to see Fibery as a bonafide CRM. We use a CRM alongside Fibery, itâs painful. Use Fibery to track leads, and feedback, but some of the set up has been unnatural for our Customer interaction team. All CRMâs are basically dbâs with various relations, tags, etc. and Fibery does that as well as anything.
I think some of the âquality of lifeâ stuff would also need to be worked out for more CRM-type staff to buy in:
Thanks!
Interesting take here. Having made the transition from ClickUp to Fibery in the past year, that is not my experience. I think Fibery is still more closely overlapped with Notion & Airtable and directly a competitor to Coda. Just my market analysis.
Just adding another friendly complaint. I find that the UI often isnât optimized for a CRM. For example, if I search âLee Smithâ, of which I have three different contacts with that name. I need to open each one to see who it isâŚthis is an issue with the main search, but also when adding relations from a quote or company. I end up needing to always open the entity to make sure itâs the right one, and sometimes I am still connecting to the wrong one and need to try to connect to the other one.
Are those three Lee Smith the same person with different Deals in progress or only one Lee Smith with two Deals?
On my CRM setup, we add people to one database only, the People database. If that person has multiple Deals, I would create multiple deals on the database linking the same person.
Anyway, indeed we could have different people with the same full name, and in this case, it would be hard to differentiate them just looking at the search results.
Potential solution here:
Change the entity name to a formula so you can include an identifying property in the name. In NetSuite itâs often First Last #Contact ID.
Iâve also liked First Last | Lead or First Last | Customer.
It wonât solve the problem if the results are served from different databases though (email integration, discourse integration, contacts).
I do this a lot, but names end up getting very long to try and be unique. Airtable and Notion allow you to select additional fields to view on your relation selection. So in this case, adding the company name. I would LOVE if Fibery added this. Would help with more than just CRM.
Relevant conversation here: Open larger view on relation field dropdown
These are three separate Lee Smiths.
I tried creating the name with a formula, but it creates issues when Iâm creating entities from another entity. If I have a new prospective customer, normally I need to add a quote, a company and a contact entity (which are separate databases). I like the freedom to start with any of the entities (usually the quote), then adding the company and contact in the relation field. With a formula, itâs hard to create a contact directly, since it overwrites it, so I end up creating an empty entity, then opening it to fill in the data in the editable field.
Agree with this. I think Monday and ClickUp are among the range of âproject managementâ first tools (throw in Wrike, Teamwork, Asana, etc etc) that have been around a relative long time, and still are pretty rigid and remain uninteresting vs. Fibery for my team due to some of the unique things Fibery provides:
Amazing wiki-like referencing and creation of items with the â#,â in particular the inline capability, then backlinks with context that let you see the source of literally everything in Fibery if properly utilized by users
Good enough search that indexes just about everything, although a lot of improvement could be gained here
No notion of a âtaskâ that dominates these other tools, even though some of them now refer to âitemsâ etc when in reality at their core the atomic entity is generally a task of some sort. That makes it artificial to track stuff that isnât work in those apps
Like the old âno codeâ core group such as Airtable, Coda, and Notion - the big âthreeâ alternatives for a good few years some time back, Fibery treats all entities the same, and you wind up with a very simple solution. I actually think Docs are unnecessary because entities in DBâs can do all what Docs can, and the fewer types of features in an app to deal with, the better. Clickup, Monday, Asana etc all make you use some kind of alternative entity to handle Docs, Notes, chats. In Fibery Iâd still like to see the evolution to where the comments could become âreferable,â in particular like here in Discourse where they are able to be quoted by just dragging (feature request Ability to quote text across Fibery like in Discourse). This would provide a truly unique edge on the Notionâs, Tanaâs, Capacities, - all the bleeding edge stuff of the market, none of which can handle this well.
A bit off topic I know but always interested to discuss the ins-and-outs of Fibery vs the other guys and the continued evolution I hope to a tool that can truly serve to document all a teamâs activities, and provide the absolute superior approach to traceability and clarity within the content that is contained within.
Thanks!
Iâve set up Fibery as a CRM for several clients but what makes it hard to use is the UX. Fibery overall UX needs a huge improvement.
There are too much thinks I would say so I will not list them here. If you open an âUX enhancementâ task I would be glad to contribute.
I would like to be able to add my users database into my CRM database.
I currently have a field called âResponsible Partyâ which is made up only of my users - these people are responsible for a project for the life of the project. But then I have another field called âNext Step Party,â to help people with smaller roles in the project to easily see that they have actions to take within the project. However, sometimes, I have outside parties I need to wait on. I would probably prefer they be in the âNext Step Partyâ field, as that consolidates things and seems reasonable to me. But since I donât know how to merge my CRM database of all people with my User database of only people Iâm buying licenses for, I have a third field called âExternal Waiting On.â ÂŻ_(ă)_/ÂŻ
So if I could have my user database⌠duplicate itself? Into my CRM database? That would be nice. It would be great to preserve the benefits of using the user-field while also having access to my broader CRM all in the same field. So if non-users are inserted into the field, they just function like a normal relation. But if a user is added to the field, then âpoofâ - I get user-benefits in that field.
Another problem generally I have is I canât paste names that have a comma in them. This is a big big problem because I work with legal entities - nearly all of which have a comma in their legal name (Really Cool Company, LLC).
Fibery does not support something like a âpolymorphic fieldâ that could be either a Relation (to a User) or just some text.
Youâre going to need a separate User relation field and Text field for that.
You could automate auto-linking a User to the relation when you enter their name in the text field, but how well that would work would depend on the scriptâs ability find the âcorrectâ User to match whatever youâve put in the text field⌠not necessarily easy.
But it would be quite easy to go the other way - when you link a User to the relation field, an automation copies their name to the text field.
Yeah - Iâm more asking for a database made up of entities unique to that database but which also includes the user database.
I know you can make tables with multiple databases, but a relation field can only reference a single database (I think). This makes it impossible for me to have a relation field in a table that allows me to reference both people in my CRM and my Users.
The reason Iâd like to do this is referencing the User database directly enables various integrated benefits, like Users being notified they have been added to an entity (as an Assignee for example)
But sometimes the person I really want to Assign a task to is not a User.
So right now, I need two Assign fields - an Internal Assign and an External Assign. This is not ideal.
My solution to this problem was to create a general âPeopleâ DB that I use everywhere in the Workspace. âPeopleâ has a relation field to a Fibery User, which can either be set, or not.
