A Paradox database alternative you can open right now.
Flat pricing, unlimited users, no per-seat fees — and no sales call to find out whether it's any good. The button below opens a real, working database in your browser: Microsoft's own Northwind sample, rebuilt in Bionic Forms, with its customers, orders and line items all wired together. No signup, no email, nothing to install.
Where this is up to
- Works today, on any OS, in your browser — nothing to install, and there are desktop apps for macOS, Windows and Linux as well.
- Windows is a download now; there is no iPhone or Android app yet. The Windows app is not code-signed yet, so the first time you run it Windows shows a blue “Windows protected your PC” box — click More info, then Run anyway. Some antivirus flags it for the same reason. A certificate is bought, not written, and we would rather ship the app and say this plainly than keep you waiting on a purchase order. The phone apps get built the moment someone needs them.
- Offline is a desktop feature. The encrypted local database ships with the desktop app — macOS, Linux and Windows. In the browser it is not true: that needs a connection, and I'd rather say so here than have you find out on a train.
- The local database file is encrypted on disk (adiantum full-file encryption), and the key lives in your operating system's own secure store rather than in the file.
- I'm not going to pretend this is urgent. If your Paradox database still runs, it runs. The question is what happens the day it stops, or the day the person who maintains it moves on.
- Calculation fields do not calculate yet. Collections, fields, links between records, screens and permissions all work. A calculated field can be created and labelled, but nothing works out the value, so it shows as empty with a note saying why. If the worth of your app is mostly in its calculations, that is worth knowing before you move anything rather than after.
What it actually looks like
Both of these are the CRM template as it ships — one click from an empty account, no setup. They are screenshots of the running product, not mockups.
A grouped list view. Fields are changed in the app’s settings, or by asking the assistant, never by accident from the list.
The same app's dashboard. The charts read live from the records above, not a separate reporting tool.
How the pricing works
Flat, by what you build — never by how many people use it. Add the whole team, the contractor, the client who needs read access: the price doesn't move.
What happens when the person who built it leaves?
That's the question this is really built around, and it's the one I'd genuinely like to hear your answer to. A departmental app usually outlives the person who wrote it, and what's left behind is often a file nobody can safely change.
- The app is described, not codedDoc types, fields, views and workflows are structured definitions — the next person reads what it does instead of reverse-engineering a script.
- Every change is a revisionRecords keep their history, so "who changed this, and when" has an answer after the original author is gone.
- The data is a database on your machineOffline-first and encrypted, syncing when it can. If my company disappeared tomorrow, the file wouldn't.
- Roles are part of the appPermissions live in the app definition, so handing it over doesn't mean rebuilding who can see what.
You cannot buy Paradox any more, and that is the part that bites
Corel’s own page for the product is titled “Looking for Corel Paradox?” and answers it plainly: “Corel Paradox is now part of WordPerfect Office”, and “currently the features of Paradox is included with the latest WordPerfect Office”. There is no standalone Paradox to buy. If you need another seat, the route is a WordPerfect Office Professional licence — the edition Corel’s own store lists between roughly $260 and $400 — bought for a database that came free with it.
That is the practical shape of the problem for most people still running Paradox. Nothing has broken. But the software is now a component of an office suite rather than a product with a roadmap, and every new machine is a licensing conversation about a word processor you did not want.
A second signal worth knowing, from Corel’s own support pages rather than from us: their patches page still documents applying Hot Fix 1 to Paradox version 11.0.0.676, shipped in WordPerfect Office X5. X5 is from 2010. We are describing what their support material covers rather than making a claim about their development plans, but if you have been wondering whether you imagined the lack of movement, you did not.
What actually needs to come out of a Paradox application
Your tables are .DB files, and they are not the whole story. A Paradox table is a set of
files that travel together: the .DB table itself, .PX for the primary
index, .Xnn/.Ynn for secondary indexes, and — the one that catches
people — .MB for memo and BLOB content. The index files are derived and you do not
need them. The .MB files are not derived. Copy a folder of .DB files
without their .MB partners and every long text field arrives empty, with no error, which
is exactly where the notes and descriptions live.
Export per table, and keep the key columns. Paradox will write CSV, and CSV cannot carry a relationship. If you export the customer’s name instead of the customer’s ID, no importer can rebuild that link afterwards — ours included — because two customers with the same name are now the same customer. Ugly key columns are the ones worth keeping.
ObjectPAL does not export. If forms and business rules were written in ObjectPAL, that logic lives in the application rather than in the data, and moving means re-expressing it. Write down what it does while you still have a machine that opens the application, because “we will work it out from the code later” assumes a working copy of Paradox later.
Sourcing, plainly: the availability quotations come from Corel’s own WordPerfect site — its Corel Paradox page and the WordPerfect Office Professional listing — checked on 21 August 2026, and the Hot Fix reference from their own patches and updates page. The file-extension behaviour above is a description of how Paradox stores data, not a quotation, and we say so rather than dressing it up as a citation. We would like you to move to us, which is why the paragraph above says plainly that nothing has broken.
What you can do yourself, today
You don't have to wait for anyone to move your data. Paradox exports a table to delimited text, and the app reads a CSV directly: drop it in and it builds a collection in one step — a field per column, each typed from what the column actually holds (dates as dates, amounts as numbers, a column of a few repeated values as a dropdown), named from your data, with a meter while the rows go in. Anything it typed wrong you change afterwards in the app's settings.
Where it can't tell, it asks rather than guesses. A column of dates like 03/04/2026 could be
the 3rd of April or March 4th, and the rows it would get wrong look exactly like the rows it would get
right — so it stops and asks you which, and won't import until you answer. If one value anywhere in the
file can't be read, nothing is imported at all: a half-loaded collection is worse than an empty one,
because you can't tell which records made it and running it again duplicates the ones that did.
Import your tables into the same app, one file after another and in any order, and it looks for the links between them — an order that names a customer ID gets connected to its customer, so you can open one and see the other. It only links where both the column name and every value agree; where it isn't sure, it leaves the values alone rather than guessing.
Where it stops: it moves data. It does not convert forms, reports, ObjectPAL scripts or calculations. Those are a rebuild, done in the app itself — this just means your records can be in front of you in a couple of minutes rather than waiting on that.
What this is not
It isn't a Paradox importer — there's no automatic conversion of an existing application, and I'm not going to pretend a rebuild is a click. It isn't a spreadsheet, it isn't a form builder, and it isn't finished software with a track record. It's an honest early product with a pricing model that doesn't punish you for adding people, and I'm looking for a handful of people willing to tell me where it falls short.
What it costs to find out
Nothing, and there is no call to book. Open the demo, click around a real database, and decide for yourself. If you want your own, the free tier is genuinely free and takes a minute.
When you are ready to bring your own data, Paradox writes its tables out as delimited text and the app reads a CSV directly, working out how your tables relate to each other — that is the part described above, and it is self-serve. You do not need me for it.
Or do not build it yourself. Describe the app your business runs on and we will build a working version of it and show you — no fee, no card, and the app we build fits the free plan. How that works.
Still comparing? The pages for the other desktop databases of that era are Visual FoxPro and dBASE, and the questions are nearly the same. I have not written a Paradox-specific roundup, and the xBase one I did write does not mention Paradox at all, so I am not going to point you at it and let you find that out.
Bionic Forms is built by Matt Bidwell (Bionics LLC). If something here reads as overclaiming, tell me and I'll fix the page — that's a promise I can actually keep at this stage. Either way you can reach me at matt@bidwellhq.com.