A Beekeeper Studio alternative for working on a copy

Beekeeper Studio is a friendly open core editor with a read-only mode in every edition, and an AI Shell that runs SQL and reads the results. dbplex copies production to your Mac with personal columns masked, so that what the shell runs on is a copy. You can open the copy in Beekeeper Studio too.

Download for Mac Try it in your browser

For Apple Silicon Macs. 7 days free with every feature. No card and no account.

Community: Free
Paid: $9 to $18 a user a month
Read-only mode: Every edition
dbplex: A Mac app, 7 days free

Which one fits

Beekeeper Studio is the editor. dbplex makes sure what it edits is a copy.

Pick Beekeeper Studio if

You want a free editor, on Windows or Linux too.
You want shared cloud workspaces for a team.
You edit rows by hand in a grid.

Pick dbplex if

You want to test, migrate and break things on a copy, not on production.
You want personal columns masked before anyone, or any agent, reads them.
You want an AI agent that can only ever reach local copies.
You want saved states, branches and scheduled backups of production on your Mac.

Beekeeper Studio and dbplex, side by side

What each does when the database is production.

	Beekeeper Studio	dbplex
What it connects to	Any server you add, production included.	Production, read-only, to make a copy of any of 12 engines.
Writes to production	A read-only mode in every edition.	Nothing. It only reads production to make the copy, and has no way to write back.
AI	An AI Shell that runs SQL and reads the results, asking first unless read queries are always allowed. No official MCP server.	A built-in MCP server whose tools act on local copies only. The agent never sees production credentials.
Copying a database	Backup and Restore with pg_dump, mysqldump and sqlite3, in Professional and Business.	Pull, refresh, save states and branch. Masked as the copy is pulled on Postgres, Supabase, MySQL, MariaDB, Turso, SQL Server and Oracle. You confirm each column.
Editing rows	A grid editor.	Browse tables and run SQL; there is no grid editor.
Price	Community is free. Paid plans are $9 to $18 a user a month, billed yearly.	$12.99 a month, or $79.99 for a year of updates, after 7 free days.

Questions about Beekeeper Studio and dbplex

Can I open a dbplex copy in Beekeeper Studio?

Yes. Each copy has a localhost URL in the Connect tab. Add it as a connection.

Does Beekeeper Studio's AI ask before it runs a query?

Its docs say the AI Shell always asks for consent, unless you set read-only queries to be always allowed.

Sources

What this page says about Beekeeper Studio comes from its own pages, checked on 7 November 2026. If something has changed, tell us and we will fix it.