Managing work, tracking and organising inventories, or planning a project or event. Airtable is a modern spreadsheet platform which is also a database tool as well.
We’ve tested Airtable’s features to see how they match up against other productivity software. We have all the information you need to decide for yourself whether Airtable is right for you and your business.
Who is Airtable best suited for? Perfect if you want to manage work, track and organise inventories or plan a project or event.
Pros
+ Easy to configure and use
+ Great for project management - features support for waterfall methodology
Cons
- Limited options on the free version
- Can get a bit expensive if you need to scale
Airtable Review Summary
Airtable is a business-focused online productivity suite, the platform helps businesses to organise projects, customers and ideas. Airtable can help you power and streamline your team's workflow in a way that suits your business.
Is Airtable right for your startup or small business? Read our impartial review to find out.
What is Airtable?
Airtable is aesthetically similar to competitors such as Monday.com but, the key difference of Airtable is that it uses a shared database with collaborative tools instead of a shared online workspace.
Before the tedious-sounding "database' deters you from reading further, know that Airtable is simple and easy to use.
You can use Airtable's databases for a variety of uses. These include planning events, work schedules and projects, or automating parts of your business.
You can also organise your marketing efforts, plan your social media campaigns and track your company's sales. Integration with third-party software isn't a problem either. The databases readily integrate with apps like Gmail, Facebook and Microsoft Teams.
Airtable is a hugely versatile Platform. It should come as no surprise that companies such as Netflix and Expedia are all on board.
Collate all of your data with this easy to use software
What can Airtable help you with?
In short, Airtable helps businesses build and collaborate on all kinds of projects. Examples include marketing, production, operations, HR, sales and finance. As previously mentioned, every project you manage through Airtable functions as a database.
You start by entering information into a database that looks like a spreadsheet. Other people in your business can view the data, edit it and upload more data. Your databases can be simple, like a to-do list, or incredibly complex, like a financial accounts database.
The more advanced databases can track statistics or prices from the web like weather or stock price information. There are some benefits of using Airtable rather than a spreadsheet tool like Excel. In particular, Airtable is far more manageable for new users to navigate.
AIrtable Project Management
Airtable can be used as a project management platform to enable content pipelines, product management, event planning, user research, and more. As you create more projects, you can link tables together and build more extensive databases encompassing other databases.
Employees can create projects and invite other workers to collaborate with them. Managers can assign due dates, add notes to projects, and decide which jobs are high priority. Should a business upload all its projects onto Airtable, managers can assign each employee jobs through the platform. This helps employees to see all their jobs in one place.
You can also develop a company app using Airtable. This tool is included with many other productivity suites. Build an app that can utilise the data already in your Airtable databases and pull in new data from the web. Your app can present the data in various ways and let employees edit data while on the move. It can also carry out more advanced functions. Examples include creating and scanning QR codes and synching your business bank accounts into a single database.
So far, the Airtable community has developed more than 150 open-source apps. Should you decide to build an app for your business, you can use the source code from any community app.
How does Airtable help?
Let's say you wanted to run a content marketing campaign. First, you would list all the required jobs in the database. These could include keyword research, backlink building and general research.
Then, you would link all the relevant employees to the database to assign the jobs to them. After they accept the tasks, you can set deadlines and varying levels of urgency for each task.
Once your employees have finished their tasks, you can sign them off and create new jobs by assigning them to different projects. There's a selection of helpful templates for creating your first few databases. These include social media campaigns, event planning, employee onboarding and many more.
The Automations tool will reduce your admin hours and streamline your operations
Like its competitors, Airtable has released an automations tool. The feature lets you configure auto-executing workflows from within the platform. Automations reduce unnecessary admin hours by automating repetitive tasks. These could be meeting reminders, missed deadline alerts, and updating records and spreadsheets.
Businesses on a lean budget stand to benefit significantly from automations.
Airtable pricing
Try Airtable's Pro Plan for free
Airtable offers four price plans: Free, Pro, Plus and Enterprise. Each plan includes the features in the cheaper plans as well as some extra storage and tools.
The Free Plan gives you an unlimited number of databases and collaborators. Each database can include up to 1200 records. You're limited to up to a hundred automations per month and two weeks of revisions. You also get up to 2GB of storage per database. This is generous considering most of Airtable's competitors only offer a limited time only trial period.
The Plus Plan is Airtable's first paid plan. You can include up to 5,000 records per database and up to 5GB of storage per base. This helps with more significant projects with lots of digital media like videos and photos. You also get six months of revisions, and your tables automatically synchronise with one another. You get plenty more automations too - up to 5000 per month.
The Pro Plan offers a genuinely premier level of features. You can include up to 50,000 records per database, and you're allowed up to 20GB of storage per database, which is ideal for larger businesses. You also get 50,000 automations per month, which is more than most companies need. Priority-level support and custom branded forms are also included.
The Enterprise Plan gives you unlimited records per database and endless automation. You're also given advanced controls and security features as well as a dedicated success manager. For pricing, you'll need to contact Airtable's sales team for a custom quote.
Airtable currently offers a discount on all plans if your organisation is in the education or non-profit sectors. None of Airtable's plans charges for view-only users. Only users with editing permissions require paid accounts. Airtable also offers a grace period to help you find the plan that best suits your business.
Who is Airtable best suited for?
Businesses of all sizes use Airtable to do everything from tracking job interviews to managing large projects, and thousands of companies use Airtable to run their most important business processes every day.
Why Airtable is the best
We love the Automations tool that will reduce your admin hours massively, hugely important in any size of business. The combinations of functionality and features commonly found in spreadsheet applications and databases is inspiring.
Why Airtable is not so good
Airtable comes with limitations, by adhering to a more spreadsheet-like structure and following workspace divisions, it can fail to scale up when your company needs it the most.
More functionality similar to Google Sheets would be great. Though it has the capabilities it's still not actually a spreadsheet.
Airtable verdict?
Airtable is one of the most straightforward productivity tools available today. New users won't struggle to learn the ropes, and there's a helpful community guide section on the website. The attentive customer service support is standing by in case any issues do crop up. To keep and maintain company data in a useful and accessible format, Airtable is a great option.
Yes, you can embed an Airtable base (or just a view from a base) into any web page that supports iframes. Just enter a URL and the page, video, live stream, feed, post, or widget will appear in a frame on your dashboard.
Is Airtable free?
It can be! Airtable has both free and premium plans available. You can add as many collaborators and bases as you'd like for free, as long as each base falls below the per-base record limits described above.
How secure is Airtable?
Airtable's data is encrypted both when it is sent to and from their servers, as well as when it is at rest. Your content is protected in transit, by 256-bit SSL/TLS encryption. At rest, Airtable content is protected using 256-bit AES encryption, so in short, yes, Airtable is secure.
