feat(compare): add TablePlus, and say plainly where it ties

[datlechin]

/compare/tableplus returned 410 Gone from this repository's first commit — route named .gone, plus three tests enforcing the exclusion. Nothing in the repo recorded why. It's a live page now, and TablePlus joins the homepage table as a fourth competitor.

The research changed what this page could honestly say

Two findings, each verified twice, that invalidate the obvious comparison:

TablePlus is native. Swift/Objective-C on AppKit — not Electron, not a JVM. The runtime argument that beats DBeaver, DataGrip and Beekeeper Studio simply does not apply to it.

TablePlus ships an MCP server. Changelog v7.1.8, 10 Jun 2026: "[AI] Introduced and reworked TablePlus MCP." Three releases are titled "MCP Server + macOS 27 Golden Gate", and issue TablePlus#3794 was closed by a maintainer with "we relased this feature on the production already". It also has an LLM chat panel (OpenAI, Anthropic, Copilot, local). Their homepage mentions AI nowhere, so surface-level research returns exactly the wrong answer here.

Also: their Safe Mode has five levels and unlocks with Touch ID against our six.

So four rows are stated as ties

	TablePro	TablePlus
Technology	Native (SwiftUI)	Native (AppKit)
AI Assistant	✓	✓
MCP Server	✓	✓
Touch ID	✓	✓

They're in the table as ties rather than quietly omitted, and the verdict says it outright: "The difference is not performance and it is no longer AI — both ship an MCP server. It is the licence."

What actually differs: free vs $99 one device / $129 two, one year of updates then $59 per device to keep them; AGPLv3 vs closed source; 25 drivers vs 16; XLSX export.

What's theirs — in prosCompetitor, because it's real: Windows and Linux builds, Setapp, a perpetual licence that never degrades, shipping since 2019. The table's Windows and Linux row is a ✗ for us.

Every figure comes from tableplus.com, their docs, changelog, GitHub org or the App Store. No competitor comparison page was used as a source — including this site's own, which is how circular numbers get laundered into facts.

No benchmarks block

TablePlus is native like us and nothing published about either app's cold start survives scrutiny. The entry ships without benchmarks; Compare.tsx:167 already guards on the key so "The numbers." doesn't render, and the homepage table shows an em-dash with a footnote saying the figures are not measured rather than estimated.

Cold start    <1s     ~8s      ~10s    ~3s            —
Idle memory   ~80 MB  ~800 MB  1-2 GB  ~200-400 MB    —
Runtime       Native  Java     Java    Electron       Native (AppKit)
Price         Free    /$99     $99/yr  /$108          $99 one device, $129 two

Worth flagging: I recommended page only, leaving the homepage table alone, since TablePlus ties on three of its four rows and the table exists to make the runtime argument. You chose to add the column after seeing the evidence. Noting it so the tradeoff is on the record, not to relitigate.

Guards updated, not deleted

The never-link rule is replaced by the invariant that would actually have caught this: the route constraint and comparisons.json must list the same slugs. A slug in the route with no entry renders blank; an entry with no slug is unreachable — which is what this page was for the project's entire history.

benchmarks is now treated as optional in the two tests that assumed every entry had one, and CompareTableTest gains a check that the fallback stays an em-dash rather than becoming a plausible-looking number someone adds later to tidy the column.

Verification

pint:      passed
Tests:     164 passed (2125 assertions)   ← REQUIRE_SSR=1, no skips
typecheck: only the 2 pre-existing ssr.tsx errors

Rendered and checked by hand: /compare/tableplus returns 200, correct H1, og:image present, FAQPage schema emitted, no "The numbers." block, footer link live, sitemap includes it.

OG image rendered and visually inspected — it reads "Both native. One is free and open source."

One note on tooling: og:generate needs puppeteer, which wasn't installed. I installed it globally (the command already sets NODE_PATH=$(npm root -g), so that's the intended path) and pointed it at your existing Chrome via PUPPETEER_EXECUTABLE_PATH to skip the 150 MB Chromium download.