Rowmill.app VS Google Sheets

Rowmill.app's answer

Most tools that open the files Excel gives up on make you trade something away. Either the file goes to their server, or you write SQL to get anything out of it. Rowmill asks for neither.

You drop a CSV, then drag fields onto Rows, Columns and Values, the same way you'd build a pivot table in Excel. At ten million rows the answer comes back in about a second. The file is read inside your browser tab and never sent anywhere, and you don't have to take that on trust: Rowmill counts every byte it sends and shows you the total.

It's also upfront about its limits: the home page lists what it can't do.

Rowmill.app's answer

It depends on what you're using now.

If you upload big files to a cloud spreadsheet or an online converter: Rowmill does that job without the upload and without an account. That matters when the file has customer or staff data in it.

If Excel cut your file off at 1,048,576 rows: Rowmill opens all of it. We've measured 100,000,000 rows at 6 columns, a 7.8 GB file. The pivot works the way Excel's does.

If you're on a Mac: Excel there has no Power Pivot, so nothing inside Excel gets you past the row limit. Rowmill works the same on a Mac as on Windows.

If you're on Windows and Power Query already works for you, keep using it. Rowmill is for when Excel locks up before the file even opens, or when you need the answer before you've learned a transform pipeline.

Rowmill.app's answer

People in operations, finance, HR and agencies. Someone exports a file from a CRM, payroll, billing or an ad platform and needs one answer from it today: which client billed the most in June, how many people are on each contract type, where the ad spend went.

They know pivot tables. They don't write SQL, and they shouldn't need to. The file often has customer or employee data in it, so a free online tool is out, and the data team is a ticket and a few days away.

Rowmill isn't built for developers or data engineers, who already have good tools for this.

Rowmill.app's answer

Rowmill started from a situation that keeps repeating. Someone exports a file from payroll, billing or an ad platform and needs one number from it. Excel loads the first 1,048,576 rows and drops the rest. The free tools that could open it want it uploaded, and it has customer or staff data in it. The data team is a ticket and three days away. So people split the file into pieces, or wait, or upload it and hope.

When I mapped the tools that can open a big file, they mostly fell into two groups. The ones that keep your data on your machine want you to write SQL. The ones that don't need SQL want your file on their server. Rowmill is my attempt to need neither: the file stays on your device, and you work with it by pointing and clicking.

A mill takes raw material in bulk and turns it into something usable, which is where the name comes from. I'm building Rowmill on my own, in Poland, and it has been in public beta since October 2026. What I build next depends on what people do with it.

Rowmill.app's answer

It's a web app, and all of the work happens in your browser tab. A database engine running inside the tab reads the file from your disk and converts it once, on your device, so that later questions only read the columns and rows they need. That's why a pivot over ten million rows answers in about a second.

There's no server on the other end to send the file to. There's nothing to install and no account, and once your file is open it keeps working with Wi-Fi off. It runs in current desktop Chrome, Firefox and Safari.