I’ve been hacking on a project with DuckDB, and was shocked to discover that DBGate (my usual goto app for working with SQL dbs) doesn’t yet have support for it (though there’s a PR out for it, so hopefully there will be soon)

So of course I went on a quest to see what could use instead. I only hack in DuckDB once in a while, so I wasn’t planning to pay for anything. There’s an awesome-duckdb repo that has a section for SQL IDEs that support DuckDB, so I dutifully tried every item on the list.

TLDR; if your requirements are similar to mine (read: free and usable), DBeaver is the best bet (though it’s a little clunky).

Here’s what else I tried and why I didn’t go for them.

There are a few options:

• DuckDB itself has a built-in UI that you can use, but it’s a little strange to use and forces you into a notebook paradigm that wasn’t quite what I wanted. That said, if you’re using duckdb you probably already have it, so try running duckdb -ui.

• If you are willing to pay a monthly fee or already subscribe to Datagrip, that’s probably a probably pretty good option, but sadly my perpetual fallback license is for the version right before they added DuckDB support so that was a no-go for me.

• qStudio is also decent, but feels pretty non-native and old-school since it’s only distributed as a java .jar file