Limits#

To help you assess whether Grist will work for a use-case you have in mind, here is a list of limitations that apply to its operation.

Number of documents#

The number of documents is limited to 10 in free plans.

Paid plans allow unlimited documents. To prevent accidental abuse of the system by automation tools, team sites may be limited to 1000 documents. If you encounter such a limit for legitimate use, please contact support to increase it.

Number of collaborators#

In free plans, each document may be shared with 2 other users, not counting the creator. The set of collaborators can be different for each document.

In paid plans, documents can be shared with everyone on your team, which are paid seats. Team members are added to your team site and may inherit access to workspaces or documents within that organization. Learn more about team sharing.

Included in the paid plan: You may share each document with 2 additional non-team users without incurring extra costs.

Number of tables per document#

There is a limit of 500 on the number of tables allowed per document. This is a soft limit. If you find yourself with a large number of tables, consider merging ones that have the same structure. For example, if you have a table for each product type, consider using a single table with the product type as an extra column.

Size of documents#

As a rule of thumb, Grist works best for documents under 100,000 rows. The actual limit depends also on the number of tables, columns, and the average size of data in each cell. One way to estimate it is to measure the size of the data when it is in CSV format: the limit is around 20MB in this format. For example, a document with 200,000 rows and 12 numeric columns would reach that.

Attachments are counted separately. Attachments plus data in a single document are limited to 1GB.

Upload limits#

Uploads are limited to 50MB, both for attachments and to import data. Note that an import within this limit may result in a document that exceeds the document size limit, in which case the upload is still likely to fail.

API limits#

Free plans may be limited to 5 API requests per second per document. The team plan does not impose such a rate limit.

Separately, there is a concurrency limit of 10 for all plans: if 10 authorized API requests are currently being processed for a particular document, any other API requests will be rejected (with HTTP status code 429) until at least one of the original requests completes. A client that waits for one request to complete before sending the next would not hit this limit (assuming it is the sole client accessing the document).

Document availability#

From time to time, during upgrades and operational transitions, individual Grist documents may become inaccessible for a period of some seconds. Please bear this in mind when using Grist’s API.