The Spreadsheet Landscape: Where Mog Fits

The Current Landscape

The spreadsheet world divides neatly into two camps: proprietary products and open-source libraries.

Proprietary products — Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets — are full-featured applications with decades of investment. They handle formulas, rendering, collaboration, charting, file I/O, and much more. But you cannot embed their engines in your own application, run them on your server, or modify their behavior.

Open-source libraries each solve a piece of the puzzle. Handsontable gives you a fast data grid with spreadsheet-like editing. SheetJS (xlsx) parses and writes Excel files. Luckysheet and FortuneSheet provide browser-based spreadsheet UIs. Libraries like HyperFormula handle formula evaluation. Each is good at its slice, but none covers the full stack.

What's Missing

If you are building a product that needs spreadsheet capabilities — a financial modeling tool, a data import pipeline, a collaborative planning app — you quickly find yourself stitching together multiple libraries. One for formulas, one for rendering, one for file I/O, one for collaboration. Each has its own data model, its own assumptions, and its own bugs at the seams.

There is no single open-source project that provides a compute engine with hundreds of functions, a rendering pipeline, real-time collaboration, and native file format support in one coherent package. That gap is what Mog is designed to fill.

Where Mog Fits

Mog is a "full-stack" spreadsheet engine. A single Rust core handles formula evaluation, cell storage, CRDT collaboration, and XLSX parsing. A canvas rendering layer draws the UI. A bridge framework exposes consistent APIs across WebAssembly, Node.js, and Python.

This means you can use Mog to:

• Embed a complete spreadsheet in your web app with one component
• Process Excel files on a server without a browser or Office installation
• Build collaborative tools with conflict-free real-time editing built in
• Create custom views (Kanban, timeline, calendar) on spreadsheet data

The engine is open-source under a Modified MIT license, so you can inspect the code, contribute improvements, and deploy it without vendor lock-in.

When NOT to Use Mog

We believe in being honest about trade-offs. Mog is not the right choice for every project:

• You just need a data grid. If you need a fast table with sorting, filtering, and inline editing but do not need formulas or file I/O, a focused library like AG Grid or TanStack Table will be simpler and lighter.
• You need production stability today. Mog is pre-launch. The API is stabilizing but will have breaking changes. If you are shipping a product next week, a mature library with years of battle-testing is the safer bet.
• You need VBA or macro support. Mog implements Excel-compatible functions but does not support VBA macros. If your workflow depends on VBA, Excel remains the only real option.
• You need advanced charting out of the box. Mog's charting is in early stages. For rich, interactive charts today, pair a charting library with your data tool of choice.

Detailed Comparisons

For side-by-side feature comparisons with specific tools — including Handsontable, SheetJS, Luckysheet, and others — see our Comparison page. We update it as Mog's capabilities evolve and as we benchmark against more tools.