August 30, 2021 By Matthew Rathbone

We are absolutely thrilled to announce that Beekeeper Studio 2.0 is now available for download. 🎉🎉

It has been over a year since we initially launched Beekeeper Studio, and we’ve added so many new features and UI tweaks in that time. We’re finally 2.0, and there’s no looking back!

What 2.0 Means for Beekeeper Studio

2.0 is where software projects stop being trivial and start getting serious. We’re starting to get serious too. We think the app is now a serious database GUI with a solid minimum set of features for full time use.

Hitting 2.0 means that we’re ready to start securing the future of Beekeeper Studio. The first step is financial - building a sustainable revenue stream to support the ongoing development of the app without compromising our mission.

By the time we announce 3.0, we hope to be a self sustaining organization, able to stand the test of time. How long will that take? Who knows, but the best time to start is now.

New Features in 2.0

Brand New Features

  • Table Schema editing
  • Table index editing
  • Table relation editing
  • Drag/Drop SQLite files
  • Persistent pinned tables
  • We have our own new context menu code

Bug fixes

  • MySQL schema editing works properly
  • Index column order in PSQL fixed
  • Debian 11 DEB file compatibility
  • Fixed some visual bugs with read-only / writable data
  • Context menu memory leak fix for the sidebar

Are We Missing Critical Features?

If Beekeeper Studio doesn’t work for your use case, we want to hear about it. We’re serious. If you can’t replace your old database GUI with Beekeeper Studio, we want to hear all about it.

We’re still a 2-person team working less than full time, but we’re serious about becoming the best database app there is.

The Path to 2.0

We started working on Beekeeper Studio in June 2019, and we unofficially launched Beekeeper Studio to the world in April 2020 by tweeting at Scott Hanselman from Microsoft.

Our expectations were small - hopefully we’d learn a lot about building desktop apps, and maybe it could become a showpiece for our resumes.

Our expectations were blown away immediately. While the app was a true MVP, and thus missing about 80% of the features you’d expect, that single tweet created a steady stream of website visitors, and our user numbers immediately started to grow.

On May 6th 2020 we made the front page of Hacker News, and our traffic really took off. It hasn’t stopped since.

A Year of Growth

While we lack web metrics from the first few months, from August 2020 and onwards we began tracking web visits and downloads using the privacy-focused Fathom analytics.

Since August 2020, our monthly unique visitors and app downloads have grown 4x.

Since we don’t track active app users, we don’t have any real active user statistics, but from our download metrics, we think our active user base has grown 10x over the same time period. So folks are sticking around!


While this chart is not very accurate, it is good enough to show broad trends (in this case: going up and to the right).

You may notice the giant spikes during October 2020. We still don’t know the cause, but we do know it comes from Brazil. Smaller Brazil spikes repeat every 3 months or so.

If anyone knows why this happened, we’d love to know. We’ve never been able to figure it out.

The Path Forwards

Our user base is growing, our traffic is healthy, and our app is getting better by the day. If you are a Beekeeper Studio user or contributor, thank you, we couldn’t have done it without you.

Next up: We want to work on Beekeeper Studio full time, so we’ll be taking steps to make money in a way that doesn’t compromise our core vision for a free and open database app.

Get Beekeeper Studio

Oh hey! Thanks for reading all the way to the bottom. If you haven’t done so already, might I suggest downloading Beekeeper Studio. We support all major desktop platforms - MacOS, Windows, and Linux, so there’s no excuse!