I sell one of the alternatives below, so read this like any vendor's comparison. Bionic Forms is mine. What I offer instead of neutrality is a refusal to run the scare story. HCL is still shipping Notes and Domino, staying put is legitimate, and your real problem is that whoever built your app left and nobody dares change a field.
HCL shipped Notes and Domino 14.5.1 on 19 March 2026 and Fix Pack 1 on 16 July 2026, and extended support for 9.0.x and 10.0.x now runs to 30 June 2030. I have no trustworthy number for how many shops are staying, so I will not invent one. But the vendor is shipping, and upgrading in place is supported. Any deck opening with Domino being end-of-life is wrong on the facts.
The pain is succession. The app works, and has worked for a decade or more, but the formulas, LotusScript agents and hide-when logic were never documented, whoever wrote them retired, and nobody will touch a field now.
Some readers should close this tab and upgrade. If the app leans on reader and author fields plus the Domino ACL, replicates to genuinely offline laptops, and you still employ somebody who can run a Domino server, evolving beats replacing. That is HCL's own pitch: Nomad puts existing applications in a browser with no rewrite, and Volt MX Go puts new front ends over Domino at an unpublished price. But new screens over the same undocumented agents leave you the same three people who will not touch the workflow.
Prices checked on 18 August 2026 against each vendor's own pricing page, linked below. Vendors reprice quietly, so this is a snapshot.
Seat minimums times annual contracts catch people first. Claris FileMaker lists Starter at $19 per user per month on a 12 to 36 month contract with a five-seat minimum, so three people pay for five: $95 a month, $1,140 a year, or $3,420 on a 36-month term.
Power Apps Premium is $20 per user per month paid yearly, the $12 line needs 2,000 licences, and Dataverse gives 250 MB per user before charging $40 per GB per month. Do the multiplication, because nobody in the meeting will. Twenty-three people is $5,520 a year in seats, carrying 5.75 GB of Dataverse. A 30 GB NSF is 24 GB over, which at $40 per GB per month adds $11,520 a year.
Quickbase advertises Team from $35 per user per month and Business at $55, both footnoted as excluding a platform minimum it publishes nowhere. HCL Volt MX publishes per-user tiers with infrastructure and managed-service floors underneath, so the seat rate is not the entry cost; get a written quote. HCL publishes no list price for Notes or Domino at all: licensing is a Person Document count negotiated per estate, so finance cannot defend what it cannot see.
You will be told to use Power Apps over SharePoint or Dataverse. Check the migration story. Microsoft's only first-party Migrate from Lotus Notes page sits in the Exchange mailbox documentation and still carries ms.date 2018-08-16: it covers mailboxes, not applications. InfoPath Forms Services, what the old Notes-to-SharePoint tooling turned Notes forms into, was removed from SharePoint Online after 14 July 2026. Microsoft could not automate migrating its own forms technology to its own successor.
Airtable (Team $20 per user per month annual, editors only) moves a team fastest, but it is rows, not documents: an NSF whose forms vary by document type gets flattened into a grid, and that is where business rules get lost. Microsoft Access is already paid for on many Microsoft 365 plans, though not Business Basic, which is why it keeps happening: one file, one owner, the same cliff again in five years.
Per-seat pricing is usually the wrong shape, and the crossover comes earlier than people expect. Knack is $49 a month billed annually, flat, unlimited users, capped at 20,000 records on Starter, so count your documents first. Zoho Creator at $8 a seat passes $49 at seven people, Airtable at $20 at three, and FileMaker never gets under it because the five-seat minimum starts at $95.
Then read the licence definition, because some vendors bill editors only. If Airtable counts your three writers and lets twenty readers in free, that is $60 a month and the flat fee stops mattering. Ask every vendor: is a read-only user a licence? If holding your own data is the point, self-hosted Baserow (MIT) or NocoDB (source-available, not OSI approved) do it, though self-hosting relocates succession rather than solving it.
Notes enforces security on the document, computed when it saves, from fields on the document itself. Almost nothing on this list does that. Airtable, Knack, Tadabase, Baserow and NocoDB give you roles plus a filter hiding other people's rows, which is a view rather than a boundary. Power Apps has real row-level security through Dataverse, configured in a different product from the one your users see.
Mine copies Notes: a form declares who reads and who authors, a rule can name a group, a role or a person field on the record, and the answer is stamped onto the document as it saves. Where mine is worse: conditions can only key on a select, multiselect or checkbox field, rules only grant and never deny, and identities come from a picker. If your NSF computes its Readers field with @DbLookup, I cannot express that.
Getting the documents out is the bit you can do this afternoon. A Notes view exports to CSV and my importer reads one directly: it refuses an ambiguous date like 03/04/2026 rather than picking a reading, and imports nothing if a single value fails, because a half-loaded collection is worse than an empty one. A view export will not carry attachments, rich text or multi-value fields; for those it is DXL or the Domino REST API and a script.
Formulas, LotusScript, agents, hide-when logic, reader and author fields and design-template inheritance move nowhere, on any product in this table. Two bits of plumbing catch people out too: an app that sends mail leans on the Domino router, and one that validates names leans on the Domino Directory, so your people have to exist somewhere else. And you do not have to move history: leave the old NSF read-only for as long as retention asks.
One blunt thing first. You run Windows. There is no Windows desktop app, only a waitlist, and the desktop app is the part that resembles a Notes replica on your own machine. It ships on macOS and Linux. On Windows you get the browser version, which needs a connection like every other name here, because offline is a desktop feature.
Bionic Forms is a local-first platform where the database is the app. The desktop app keeps your data in an encrypted SQLite file on your own machine, with the key held by your operating system's own secret store, syncing through my server when online. You describe the application, an assistant builds the forms, views, workflows and history, and you edit it by hand.
The obvious objection: how is an app an assistant generated not the same trap in a newer file format? The application is readable definitions rather than compiled agents, every record keeps its revision history, and the data is an ordinary encrypted file you can copy. A better starting position than an NSF, not immunity: if nobody writes down why the workflow does what it does, you are back here in 2038 reading my file format instead of Iris Associates'.
Pricing has no seat count in it anywhere. Every plan carries unlimited users, and you pay for how much you build: one app free with 1 GB of hosted files, $29 a month for ten apps and 50 GB, $99 a month for unlimited apps and 250 GB. Check your NSF size: fifteen years of attachments past 1 GB puts you on $29 a month, $348 a year, at any headcount.
The rest of the limits, in body text rather than fine print. Bionic Forms is pre-launch with no external customers yet. There is no iOS or Android app. The importer moves records from CSV or a Google Sheet: it does not convert applications, and there is no automatic conversion of forms, agents or formulas, true of everybody here.
Where a rival wins. If IT has standardised on Microsoft 365 and will not support anything it does not own, use Power Apps and ignore me. If you want a finished product with years of production use behind it, Knack at $49 a month flat has that and I do not; check its 20,000-record Starter cap first. If your data must stay on infrastructure you control, self-hosted Baserow. If the app must be installed on Macs, iPads or Android phones, Ninox ships native apps there and I do not.
Open a live demo database in one click at /demo, no account and no email. There is more on what this does and does not do yet at /lotus-notes.
| Product | Entry price | Model | Free tier | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| HCL Notes / Domino 2026 | Not published; quoted per estate | Person Document count, negotiated per estate | No | Document-level security and real offline replication, which is what you already have. Actively developed: 14.5.1 on 19 March 2026, Fix Pack 1 on 16 July 2026, old-stream extended support to 30 June 2030 |
| Microsoft Power Apps | $20/user/mo paid yearly (Premium); $12 at a 2,000-licence minimum | per user plus capacity | Yes, Developer Plan (learning and testing only) | Row-level security through Dataverse, configured in a different product from the one your users see. 250 MB Dataverse per user, then $40/GB/mo. No first-party migration path for Notes applications, only mailboxes |
| HCL Volt MX (Go: price not published) | Published per-user tiers, with infrastructure and managed-service floors underneath; verify with HCL | per user or per session, plus infrastructure floors | Trial, terms not verified | Volt MX Go keeps Domino as the back end, so security and offline stay exactly where they are today; new front ends, same agents underneath |
| Claris FileMaker | $19/user/mo Starter, $39 Max, annual on 12-36 month contracts | per user | No | Five-seat minimum, so $95/mo committed, $1,140 a year for three people and $3,420 on a 36-month term. Record-level access through privilege-set calculations; a local file can be worked on offline |
| Airtable | $20/user/mo annual (Team), $45 (Business) | per user, editors only | Yes | Rows, not documents: per-form field variation has to be flattened into a grid. Roles plus filtered views rather than per-document security; assume a connection |
| Knack | $49/mo billed annually, flat | flat | No | Unlimited users, 20,000 records and 3 apps on Starter, so count your documents. Roles and filtered views only; assume a connection. The $19 figure on comparison sites is a three-month promo |
| Tadabase | $50/mo, or $42/mo billed annually, flat | flat | No | Unlimited users and no free tier, so evaluating it costs money. Roles and filtered views only; assume a connection |
| Ninox | EUR 25/user/mo annual (Team), EUR 40 (Business) | per user | Yes, up to 5 users | Native installed apps on macOS, iOS and Android; Windows is web-only. Roles rather than per-document security. Priced in EUR even on the English pages |
| Zoho Creator | $8/user/mo annual (Standard), $20 Professional, $25 Enterprise | per user | Yes (1 app, 5,000 records) | Deluge scripting handles conditional logic. Roles and filters rather than document-level security; pulls you toward the wider Zoho suite for auth and mail |
| Quickbase | From $35/user/mo annual (Team), $55 (Business) | per user plus an undisclosed platform minimum | No | Both tiers footnoted as excluding the platform minimum, and that number is published nowhere |
| Baserow | $10/user/mo annual (Premium), $18 (Advanced) | per user, or self-host | Yes, 3,000-row cloud tier and free self-hosting | Genuinely MIT licensed. Roles and filtered views rather than per-document security; self-hosting means you own Postgres, backups and upgrades |
| NocoDB | $12/user/mo annual (Plus), $24 Business, $45 Scale (3-seat minimum on Scale) | per user, or self-host | Yes, cloud tier and Community self-host | Sustainable Use License, so source-available and not OSI approved. Roles and filtered views only |
| Microsoft Access | No separate price; bundled with Microsoft 365 Apps for business ($10/user/mo paid yearly) and Business Standard, not Business Basic | bundled | No | Windows desktop only, no Mac, web or phone. A local file, so offline by nature, and it repeats the single-owner failure that got you here |
| Bionic Forms | Free (1 app, 1 GB), $29/mo (10 apps, 50 GB), $99/mo (unlimited apps, 250 GB) | flat by apps and storage; unlimited users, no seat count | Yes: 1 app, 1 GB, unlimited users | Per-record reader and author rules declared on the form. Offline is a desktop feature and the desktop is macOS and Linux: no Windows desktop app, only a waitlist. Pre-launch with no external customers; no iOS or Android app; the importer moves records and does not convert applications |
Is HCL Notes and Domino being discontinued? No. Version 14.5.1 shipped on 19 March 2026 and Fix Pack 1 on 16 July 2026, and extended support for the old 9.0.x and 10.0.x streams runs to 30 June 2030. Upgrading in place is a supported option, not a stay of execution.
Can a tool automatically convert my Notes application to SharePoint or Power Apps? Not the application, no. Documents and field values, attachments, some rich text as HTML or PDF and view definitions can be moved with tooling. Formulas, LotusScript, agents, hide-when logic, reader and author fields and replication semantics cannot. Microsoft's only first-party Lotus Notes migration page covers mailboxes, not applications, and it was last revised in 2018.
How much does HCL Domino cost per user? HCL publishes no price. There is no Domino pricing page and no public list price. What is public is the shape: licensing is counted on Person Documents and negotiated per estate, which is why one departmental application has no attributable cost of its own. Get the terms in writing, and treat per-seat figures on aggregator sites as unsourced.
What is the cheapest credible replacement for a small departmental Notes app? If a few people write and many read, flat fees win: Knack at $49 a month billed annually or Tadabase at $42, both unlimited users. Per seat, Zoho Creator at $8 per user per month annual is the cheapest credible platform. Bionic Forms is free for one app with unlimited users, and $29 a month for ten, with no seat count at all. Prices were checked on 18 August 2026 and vendors reprice without notice.
Can I get my Notes application into a browser without leaving Domino? Yes. Nomad serves existing applications in a browser and on phones with no rewrite, and Volt MX Go builds new front ends over Domino. Neither fixes succession: the logic nobody understands is still the logic running the application.