The French government is harnessing the power of Grist to improve the productivity of its public administration. Grist is a relational database disguised as a simple spreadsheet. It is a mix between a collaborative spreadsheet, a database and a no code app builder. As explained by Grégoire Cutzach, Technical Product Director Grist at OPI / LaSuite The Digital Services Incubator (DINUM), and Jaime Arredondo, Open Source Expert within DINUM’s Digital Commons team, in response to our questions, Grist contributes to modernise the digital tooling for the public agents, while making financial and time savings, by replacing tools that were very expensive to maintain. OSOR already featured this tool as solution of the month in October 2024.
Grist has been adopted in the context of the Digital Suite (Suite Numérique), as previously covered by OSOR, the French open source project, designed for the public sector. It is supported by the National Agency for Territorial Cohesion (ANCT) and the Interministerial Directorate of Digital Affairs (DINUM). The first operational versions of Grist have already been implemented and have been running for three years within the Digital Suite and through the ANCT incubator for local authorities with fewer than 3,500 inhabitants.
It is now well established that open source software today also corresponds to digital sovereignty. While the French government supports this strategic objective of digital sovereignty, with a strategy that consists of “deploying sovereign instances and contributing to the Grist core code to ensure the tool's sustainability and security” the value of Grist can also be seen in its ability to improve the daily work of public agents. Before Grist, agents spent a lot of time exchanging multiple versions of traditional spreadsheets, which left little room for focusing on actual public policy work. With Grist, teams collaborate on a single shared file, where data is consolidated live, freeing up time and allowing agents to dedicate their efforts to more meaningful and strategic tasks.
The role of the French Government for the implementation of Grist.
One of the most significant aspects is that the French government is currently the largest contributor to the project, alongside the original developer. This support is also demonstrated through a series of best practices to standardise the training of public officials (ANCT and DINUM) developed through various initiatives. Among the main ones are webinars and workshops open to all agents with recorded content available on platforms such as Peertube, and the expansion of documentation for the entire community through dedicated forums and help centres that make possible to centralise the resources created by Grist Gouv and the community itself. The focus is also placed on users and on documenting the widgets and templates created by them, paired with the promotion of collaboration between agents through common channels such as Tchap and online forums.
Concrete use cases in public administrations
Grist is a highly flexible and versatile tool that supports multiple operational functions and can therefore meet the complex needs that characterise daily work in public administration, helping agents save time and money. Among the most common uses are the monitoring of priority Neighbourhoods in the City (QPV), the management of DINUM's budget dashboard, project management, event organisation, supervision of project portfolios and the creation of customised professional software to replace obsolete tools. According to the interviewees, many ministries, like the Ministry of the Ecological Transition or the DINUM use Grist to manage multi-million euro budgets and the payrolls of hundreds of public agents and contractors. Today, the expansion of Grist's use in France is a further confirmation of the added value it brings to public administration: the tool has been adopted by 15 ministries, by all 100 prefectures and by major cities such as Lyon and Strasbourg.
Scaling Innovation: National and Future Growth
In 2026, Grist remains an innovative open source tool for public administration. The beginning of this year has already proven fruitful for the expansion of Grist. Grist.gouv, the joint initiative of DINUM and ANCT, reached 20,000 monthly active users in January 2026, ten times more than in January 2025. Leaning forward, the next steps for Grist include further expansion at the national level, strengthening partnerships with the private sector to grow the open source community and expanding the use of the tool in the public economy. As highlighted by the interviewees, a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) created through collaboration between Grand Lyon and Eurométropole de Strasbourg is expected to be published shortly under Creative Commons Attribution licence, which allows anyone to freely access, use, share, and adapt the course materials, provided that proper credit is given to the original creators. New use cases such as conditional forms and table synchronisation between different Grist documents are also expected.
