Fibery Product Report: February 2025

We’ve made four releases in February. Total Highlights Score: 788 :flexed_biceps: (for comparison, it was 551 in January).

Polina recorded a nice webinar, watch it to see all changes in action:

Permissions

Things are going well:

  • the adoption for most features is decent;
  • the delivery pace is steady;
  • there seem to be few conceptually unsolved problems now.

Here is how different permissions features are being adopted in collaborative workspaces (WAU ≥ 2):

Database access has turned out to be an unexpectedly popular thing with a quarter of collaborative workspaces using it. At the end of the March, we’ll be able to tell how Group permissions are doing—⅓ of the equivalent User permissions numbers would be a success.

Despite our counterintuitive way to set up User Groups, 90% workspaces on Pro plan with 20+ active users have created at least one User Group DB.

Done

Everything you can share with an individual User, you can now share with a Group:

  • Share Database with Group
  • Automatically share entities with linked Groups

We’ve also made a few usability tweaks to help power users to discover and understand the new functionality:

  • Show if access template is used in automatic access when managing it
  • Update sharing popup placeholder to make Guests more discoverable
  • Navigate to access template configuration from dropdown
  • Disable access template dropdown if automatic access via People Field is being recalculated

In progress

The next big thing is revamping the outdated and limited Space access. Andrew has dived into the foundations that will unlock these things:

  • Allow not to extend access from Space to its Databases
  • Allow to have Databases outside Spaces (in Default Space)
  • Consolidate default access template names across Space, DB, and Entity levels
  • Deprecate Contributor Space access

We are gradually transitioning from mostly working on powerrrr! to mostly working on simplicity, discoverability, and understanding:

  • Explain sources in access audit
  • Add Access screen for Spaces and Databases

Next

In March, we’ll start the parts of user management that don’t depend on the core. Ihar has kindly agreed to help as we are building on top of the DBs in the sidebar idea:

  • Manage Users like any other Database
  • Manage User Groups as part of User DB settings

Required fields

We’ve released Required Fields in February.

45 accounts have at least one field, and 7 more than 2 fields. Quite OK for 2 weeks after release.

Next

Now we are working on better in-place UI and it will take the whole March to complete it seems.

  • Required fields special UI: Table View
  • Required fields special UI: List, Board View, Calendar, Feed and Timeline Views
  • Required fields special UI: Search
  • Show toast on new entity creation, views always comply to filters and do not show entities that are out of filters range

Then we will work on “Improve Entity creation when formula is used for name”.

Sidebar

We’ve released the new sidebar structure. It looks like new sidebar reception is positive. We have (unexpectedly) low negative feedback %, most users (and especially admins) are happy with the changes. Anyway, some minor things here and there should be improved.

Done

  • Default Space (without databases)
  • Admin sets spaces order for all users and user can’t reorder spaces in All Items mode
  • Spaces in Folders (former Nested Spaces)
  • Merge search results for both tabs in the sidebar

Next

We are going to finalize navigation theme with the following features

  • Home Page in Fibery
  • Create personal Folders in Favorites (maybe)
  • Kostas is going to re-write left sidebar to improve DnD, we’ll see how this experiment goes…

Timeline View and Dependencies

We implemented and released most major features to enable dependency management in Fibery.

  • Dependency relation config on field editor
  • Dependencies on a Timeline
  • Improve entities creation on Timeline View
  • Hide empty lanes on Timeline View

Current adoption is very modest, it is safe to say that ~15 accounts use dependencies and only 5 use it quite a lot. Daily usage

Next

We are going to finalize timeline improvements with the major update

  • One line per entity (always) + Entities List + Visualize nested Entities (parent/child) on Timeline.

Or maybe just do Drag and drop to change vertical position on timeline without major changes… We’ll see.

We will also implement a proper weekends handling on Timeline:

  • Avoid weekends when moving dependent cards
  • Weekend setting per user

AI

We experimented with AI Agent. It can reason and ask relatively complex questions around Fibery data. For example, this is the answer to a question “Find workspaces with trial expiration date coming in March and provide usage information about every workspace”

However, it works quite slow (1-3 mins) and it is expensive. Now we are optimizing it and going to include into FIbery in March/April. We also shared prototype with 4 customers, got positive feedback from 1 and waiting something from other accounts.

Anthropic shows much better results, and we may use it for AI Agent.

:octopus: If you want to play with the AI Agent on your workspace, DM me here or ping us in Intercom.

Performance

We’ve improved docs loading and added cache to the most popular views.

  • View Cache
  • Improve Document and RichText field load timings

For March:

  1. We constantly have performance issues because of queries for capabilities. With Dima we agreed on approach to reduce load, I will implement it. Estimate is about a few days it seems.
  2. View cache hit rate is 20% across all workspaces. I’ll prototype a solution to store view-cache in browser indexdb, so hit rate should increase. Estimate is unclear so far.

Email/CRM Theme

While we completed all planned features, it is unclear what to do next. Community feedback showed that there are many missing things to transform Fibery into a powerful CRM. However, it might work good for some limited use cases and some companies already.

We spent some time on CRM solution template, but it is far from ready. Future of CRM is unclear :neutral_face:.

Whiteboard

We have released the first set of features for comments on the whiteboard to enhance team collaboration, and search functionality for the whiteboard. The second part of comments is already in progress, along with a few basic improvements for sections.

The main features left to implement are sharing and embedding the whiteboard for external sources, as well as embedding views on the whiteboard for cases like dashboards. In the background, I’ll be working on describing Mind map use cases and gathering useful Whiteboard: Templates — possibly for implementation in Q2.

Done

  • Inline Commenting on Whiteboard
  • Whiteboard: Find text

In Progress

  • Sidebar, reactions, and search for comments
  • Whiteboard: Sections improvements

Next

  • Share whiteboard
  • Embed views into the whiteboard (reports, tables, etc)
  • Whiteboard: Groups improvements
  • Whiteboard: Mind Map (maybe)

And this will conclude whiteboard improvement initiative. Then we will mostly only fix bugs.

P.S. Your thoughts and ideas are welcome :light_blue_heart:

5 Likes

In our case Required fields would have been perfect, as we have a lot of entities that must be related to a project.
However the way required fields work now with tables, makes the whole user experience far worse.
I want to be able to simply create a new row/entity.
What happens now if I enable required fields is that entering a new row shows me a popup asking me to select the required field (Project) even though that field is already filled out (since I am i a smart folder, per Project).

I’m excited to see what comes from this!

Good idea. It’s easy for feature creep to overcome the UI and make the UX suffer. I’m glad y’all are keeping this in mind!

Is this referring to the access audit, like for entities? I was just thinking about this earlier today! It’s like y’all are in my mind. :exploding_head:

I really like the idea of this. For our few power users, they would like to organize the items they have in their Favorites section.

This is what we will fix in March

1 Like

Don’t forget also public holidays per user.

Not now unfortunately

Always love to read these reports! Thanks for taking the time to write them up. :))

I have some ideas and notes on what was shared.

Would be lovely to have custom access templates for Spaces. To decide which databases are share in what way.

Yeess!!! Really happy so see this :))

If workspaces have lots of group databases, this view could become overwhelming. Allowing users to view the databases as table / group by space and other things databases have would be nice to see in the “view” of databases.

Curious to see how this turns out!! I would love to be able to set / adjust it as the admin. I’ve recommended in the past to use the “Current User” entity as the home page. But then it might need better entity layout controls. What if entity view was treated as a dashboard?.

Drag and drop databases across spaces? :eyes:

From what I’ve seen there are people that NEED this to use a software, so those people have simply not joined fibery yet. I have a feeling dependency management is a “We use it a lot” vs “We dont use it all” type of feature. Those who use it a lot aren’t using fibery yet… But now they can!

While this makes me happy, it also makes me quite sad. I think whiteboard needs quite some improvements still to be functional in the workspace. The main ones being: Include whiteboard content in global search and references and Displaying Metadata for Documents & Whiteboards

Whiteboards can not be used in a workspace because the knowledge inside of them is not linked to anywhere and not even searchable across the workspace. I really feel it goes against Fibery’s vision… Not sure if these are just too big to do right now, or if I have a conceptual misunderstanding of what a whiteboard should be used for…

2 Likes

+1 for your comments around whiteboards. Outside of searching for the whiteboard name, it’s difficult to centralize and organize your whiteboards (without manually adding links 1-1 to a document)

What makes Fibery whiteboards so useful is being able to link/embed content. As far as I know it’s one of the only apps that has this kind of functionality (separate from Obsidian + Excalidraw but I don’t consider that a team tool).

In other tools like FigJam or Miro whiteboards don’t have any real connectivity. A sticky note is just a sticky note, unlike Fibery where an entity on the board represents something that has way more meaning and depth.

I think the whiteboard has a lot of power and value when combined with the structure that Fibery provides you in other areas. It’s the place where you work in both a structured (entities) and unstructured way. I find it useful for being able to layout ideas/tasks and do some loose grouping/sequencing.

2 Likes

Not sure what makes you feel this way! I’ve actually been impressed by the CRM templates and their capabilities so far. I’d say connecting with a few power users to explore what more could be done is a must.

One major unlock would be CRM-focused integrations. Right now to truly get the CRM beefed up, you need to be pretty technical.

For example, I spent a few hours yesterday just trying to get our Fireflies.ai meeting notes to upload smoothly into Fibery. It works, but feels janky, relies on Make, and isn’t nearly as smooth or seamless as it could be. In Coda, this is much easier with a dedicated pack—reducing errors, mismatches, and overall friction. With just a few clicks, you get a fully integrated database with all the details automatically pulled from Fireflies. That makes it accessible to way more users, unlike Fibery’s setup, which requires digging through Fireflies’ API documentation and spending hours on troubleshooting just to get something that feels good enough.

Another key feature I’d love to see:

:link: Automatic Gmail Sync for Activity Tracking

Right now, I can sync one inbox, but to fully track email communication with customers and leads, I’d need every team member to manually connect theirs. I can’t recall exactly how HubSpot handles this, but having a seamless way to sync all team emails into an Activities database would be huge. It would improve transparency, prevent team members from stepping on each other’s toes, and give full communication context.


Similar ideas apply to Shopify orders, Stripe data, and many other integrations found in Coda, Monday, and similar tools.

I could go on, but I think you get the idea. I really hope Fibery stays focused on CRM because the potential is huge—and let’s be honest, Salesforce and HubSpot are bloated and restrictive.

Fibery has the chance to redefine what a truly powerful and flexible CRM looks like.

3 Likes

Love Fibery’s energy… And the transparent analysis. It’s beautiful.
Keep it up!

2 Likes

I hope you will cover whiteboards as well.
In our case with smart folders per project, entities added from whiteboards always end up disassociated from a project, because whiteboards live “outside” the context of a smart folder, so required fields would come in handy there

Good news here: this feature exists. You can invite individual team members to authenticate ands add their emails to the existing email database

2 Likes

Indeed →

1 Like