Grist vs SeaTable

Grist

OAuth tokens carry seven scopes, can be limited to chosen documents and expire after an hour, and the REST API has a public OpenAPI file with an add-or-update call. No status page, SLA terms, DPA or security.txt was found, and the docs say the hosted service has no SOC 2 or ISO 27001 audit.

SeaTable

API tokens are limited to one base and to read-only or read-write, and the official MCP server marks every tool as read-only or destructive. The Free plan allows 3,000 API calls a month in total, and base calls are capped at 200 a minute. The status page showed the base API degraded for 0.77 per cent of 30 days.

Grist

1. Connect through OAuth, not an API key. Ask for doc:read alone for reading, and have the user pick Selected resources on the consent screen
2. Keep doc.schema:write off unless needed. The docs say formula editing lets its holder read any data in the document whatever the access rules
3. Send requests for one document one at a time. The eleventh concurrent request gets 429, and no Retry-After header is documented
4. Use PUT /api/docs/{docId}/tables/{tableId}/records with require to add or update by key, so a retried write doesn't create a duplicate row
5. Use the /records endpoints, not the deprecated /data ones, and split large writes to stay under the 1 MB body limit

SeaTable

1. Create an API token for the one base with read-only permission unless writes are needed, then exchange it at /api/v2.1/dtable/app-access-token/ for a Base-Token
2. Renew the Base-Token before it expires after 3 days, and send it as Authorization: Bearer to /api-gateway/api/v2/dtables/{base_uuid}/
3. Read x-ratelimit-remaining and x-ratelimit-reset on every base call. SeaTable Cloud allows 200 base calls a minute and answers 429 with no body
4. Batch writes to save the monthly quota. One call appends or updates up to 1,000 rows over REST and 100 over MCP
5. Over MCP, prefer update_rows and delete_rows to query_sql, which can run UPDATE and DELETE, and call get_schema before writing