15 years helping Canadian businesses
choose better software
Airtable
What Is Airtable?
Airtable is the relational database for the rest of us. With a spreadsheet-like interface that anyone can use, realtime collaboration, and rich features like file attachments and reporting, Airtable is the friendliest modern database.
Who Uses Airtable?
Small business and teams within larger organizations
Not sure about Airtable?
Compare with a popular alternative
Airtable
Other great alternatives to Airtable
Reviews of Airtable
Alternatives Considered:
Only limited by your time and creativity
Comments: We have about 10 different business processes that we track in Airtable. It's amazing how flexible it is, and the overall experience has been extremely smooth. It's especially easy to get new users up to speed quickly because of how intuitive the Airtable is, which is an especially difficult feat given how extensively you can customize everything. They have a great online help and video training as well.
Pros:
Airtable brings actual structure to our working environment. We use for a team of 15 to track tasks, projects, and even for lightweight documentation of work done or where stuff is. I really like the flexibility and the ability to create just about anything with it and still make the finished product look nice. The UI is what people first comment on when I invite them to our shared set of bases--either "it looks great" or "this is easy" or something like that. I especially love the integration with Zapier so that if you need to go outside an Airtable base, you probably won't have to do manual entry--it can sync with your other app.
Cons:
With the free version, you will hit the record limit will pretty easily. I wish they had a lower-priced plan that was above the free version, but below their much more expensive tiers. A second huge miss is that there was really no way to do rich text. That severely limits the usefulness for using Airtable as any kind of repository for content or anything like that. Basically you convert everything to HTML markup and store it as plain text in Airtable, but like I said they have promised to fix this . . .
Airtable is a great collaborative project manager
Comments: My team and I like Airtable because it helps us keep track of all of our clients in one central location. My initial impression was that it wouldn't really make a difference in our regular operations, but now I see how wrong I was. With Airtable, users are able to work with many data types in a grid-based environment. It also facilitates the development of cloud-based apps that are easily integrated with other infrastructure.
Pros:
One of my favorite features is the ability to personalize each of my boards. Not only that, but I have the ability to work closely with my team by syncing and discussing our respective projects and making use of our shared notes. It's incredible how many wonderful things there are in the Universe. Airtable helps me plan out my monthly social media posts in advance. I'm able to keep on top of things and make timely social media posts because I plan ahead. My knowledge and experience have taught me to be more methodical and cooperative in my job.
Cons:
Every once in a while, things aren't as user-friendly as they could be. Sometimes I'll make my own template, but first I'll look at tens of others to get ideas. Be patient with the procedure; it will take some time to complete. Once set up, the interface is typically straightforward.
Airtable for the win!
Comments: Airtable allows our team to easily search for jobs and communicate with each other through the system.
Pros:
I love how versatile and moldable Airtable is. You can customize it to fit your business needs. We use forms to capture new customer inquiries and store all of our project management data within it. We use automations to reduce human error and stress on employees so they can focus on customer service and problem solving.
Cons:
We needed to build out a customer portal and at the time, we were not able to do it all in Airtable so added on a couple of other products to make it happen but were still happy when it began to work.
Simple CRM system that is effective at its price
Comments: Its a solid CRM system but requires a lot of manual data input that is tiresome. If done correctly, it can be a good tool
Pros:
The cost was very cheap and once the data was uploaded it was easy to interact with
Cons:
The manual nature of updating every item here made it so that AirTable became less and less important as updating it became another job
Alternatives Considered:
Seamless Organization and Automation
Comments: Airtable has transformed our workflow. It lets us organize, manage, and automate our projects and tasks in a way that's tailored to our unique needs. The customization options are endless, and we've created the perfect interface for every project. We plan to continue to expand our use of Airtable and are actually now hiring a new team member to look after data, which I suspect will further our use of Airtable.
Pros:
We love Airtable's outstanding automation and linking features. Automating repetitive tasks and connecting our data to other platforms has been a breeze, saving us a lot of manual work. The interface is so user-friendly that it hardly feels like we're dealing with a database. We can easily create custom views for different projects, and it's great to be able to adjust the interface to meet our specific needs. I personally really like the calendar and kanban views, and the easy to build dashboards and highly flexible interfaces. These have allowed us to modernize old processes.
Cons:
Initially, there was a bit of a learning curve with Airtable. But once we got the hang of it, the possibilities seemed endless and we want to integrate it even further into our work. The only real con we’ve encountered has to do with the need to add collaborators to a base, and accordingly the cost associated with this.
