What Is Airtable?
Airtable is a popular relational database software that aims to combine the flexibility of spreadsheets with the power of databases. It’s a cross-functional tool that allows users to create, share and manage databases in a visually appealing way. Many see Airtable and believe it’s not much more than a glorified spreadsheet; however, the platform offers numerous features, including:
- Database and spreadsheet software
- Pre-made templates for efficiency
- Tools for task management and tracking
- Multiple views, including lists, Kanban boards and Gantt charts
- Great for team collaboration
Airtable can be seen as an upgraded version of a Microsoft Excel sheet as it allows you to create, sort and update tables, fields and views, which can be shared with team members to collaborate on projects. We rated Airtable as one of the Best Project Tracking Software for data-driven companies.
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monday.com
Yes
From $8 monthly per user
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Wrike
Yes
$10 per user per month
Salesforce, Adobe, Miro, Netsuite, QuickBooks, SAP
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Hubspot
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$15 per seat per month
Zoom, Slack, Google Workspace, QuickBooks and more
Airtable Key Features
Project management software is only as good as the features it offers and Airtable has features by the bucket load. Below, we’ll cover the software’s key features so you can see if it provides what you need.
Views
Airtable provides users with customizable views that allow them to analyze and organize their data in a way that best suits their needs. These views make Airtable so much more than a powerful spreadsheet. In fact, I’d go as far as saying that the sheer number of task and project management views makes Airtable suitable for numerous Agile teams and even those using traditional methodologies and frameworks such as Waterfall and AgileFall. Here are some of its views.
- List view: The List view allows users to organize their data in a simple, easy-to-read format. It’s ideal for managing tasks, tracking progress and creating to-do lists.
- Timeline view: The Timeline view lets users visualize their data on a timeline, making it easy to track projects, events and resources over time. It’s a great way to manage complex projects and ensure that everything is on track.
- Kanban view: The Kanban board view is a drag-and-drop interface that allows users to manage their workflow in a visual, intuitive way. It’s ideal for team collaboration and task management. Airtable’s Kanban cards allow custom fields, which makes it easier to tailor them to your project’s needs.
- Gantt view: The Gantt chart view provides users with a comprehensive overview of their projects, including task dependencies, milestones and deadlines. It’s a great tool for managing complex or multistep projects.
- Calendar view: The Calendar view helps users keep track of key dates and deadlines associated with their data. It’s a great way to stay organized and ensure that nothing falls through the cracks.
- Grid view: The Grid view is a flexible interface that allows users to group, sort and enrich their data in a way that makes sense for them. It’s a great tool for data analysis and organization.
- Gallery view: The Gallery view displays data with imagery for easy visual recognition. It’s ideal for showcasing designs and creative work in a comprehensive, organized format.
- Form view: The Form view allows users to create shareable forms that populate records in their Airtable base. It’s a great way to collect contact information or survey respondent data.
In Airtable, list view is the default option; however, switching between views is straightforward.
Role Assignments
Airtable’s role assignment features allow for granular control over what collaborators can and cannot do within a workspace or base. By assigning the appropriate permissions, you can ensure that your data remains secure and accurate, while also promoting healthy team collaboration.
Airtable’s role and user permissions can be set quickly.
There are four different levels of permissions for collaborators: Owner/Creator, Editor, Commenter and Read-Only. Each level has its own set of actions that can be taken, from basic actions such as accessing and viewing the base, to more advanced actions including creating or deleting tables, configuring automations or creating interfaces. User permissions and roles may seem trivial, but they play a significant role in ensuring your company data is secure.
Reporting
With Airtable, users can create and customize reports using the platform’s out-of-the-box extensions. These extensions enable users to generate charts, graphs and top-line metrics to suit their team’s reporting needs. Airtable’s flexible UI also allows users to group or sort data in a way that makes sense to their business, making it easy to track progress and identify areas for improvement.
Creating detailed reports and insight dashboards only takes a few minutes.
For those with coding expertise, Airtable’s developer tools offer unlimited possibilities for creating custom reporting systems. These tools include scripting, extensions SDK and robust APIs that provide developers with complete control over their reporting workflows.
Software Integrations
Integrations are an important feature of any project management software, so it would be remiss of me not to mention them. Airtable, which only offers 36 native integrations, is a far cry from Asana, which offers over 100 free integrations out of the box. Still, you will find integrations to many leading platforms, including:
- Project management tools such as Asana, Basecamp and Trello
- File management tools such as Dropbox, Evernote and Google Drive
- Communication tools such as Email, Gmail, SMS, Slack, Twilio and Google Contacts
- Social networking tools such as Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn
Airtable only offers 36 native integrations, but you’ll find the most popular applications are supported.
Airtable can also be integrated with development tools such as GitHub, media tools such as SoundCloud, payment platforms such as Stripe and customer support tools such as Zendesk. There are also integrations for forms, bookmarking, CRM and events. These integrations help promote efficient workflows. Zapier also integrates with Airtable, meaning you can create integrations for applications that aren’t officially supported.
Artificial Intelligence
Airtable is one of the latest platforms to offer artificial intelligence tools. While these AI features are still in their infancy, they can do a surprisingly good job of sorting data, generating insights, creating document drafts and creating projects from scratch. I used Airtable’s Cobuilder tool to create a project and was thoroughly impressed. After telling the AI what type of project I wanted to create, what fields were important and what the project’s topic was, it set off to work.
Thanks to AI, project managers can tell the AI what sort of project they want to create and the AI assistant does the rest.
Within a minute, the AI created a full project with a content creation schedule, planned editorial meetings, budgets, assigned tasks, due dates based on my requirements and tables for cover art, events and album reviews. You can tailor the generated data to your needs or use it as is. While not quite as powerful as ClickUp’s AI tool, Airtable’s offering is nothing to sneeze at.
Airtable Marketplace
If you’re looking for project templates and extensions that can make your Airtable bases more powerful, you’ll appreciate the Airtable Marketplace. There are plenty of native integrations, such as the page designer—which I’ll cover later—reports, pie charts, flowcharts and scripts created by Airtable. Third-party developers also make extensions.
The Marketplace offers users various extensions, bases and templates.
In the Marketplace, you’ll also find dozens of templates for project management, sales and CRM, product road maps, marketing, HR and recruitment, education, IT and operations and the list goes on. Using a template is as simple as picking one and clicking “Use Template.” Within seconds, the chosen template is ready to use. With templates, you can get your next project up and running quickly.
Page Designer
Airtable’s page designer or document editor isn’t as robust as those found in Notion. Still, for project managers needing to create simple documents for team and stakeholder meetings or drafts of a project scope or plan, the page designer is ideal. While the interface isn’t the most intuitive, you quickly get used to the drag-and-drop method used to place elements on the page.
The page designer tool is a nice feature, but it pales in comparison to the page creation tools found in Notion.
Interface Designer
Airtable’s interface designer is a powerful tool that enables anyone to create custom interfaces without any coding skills. It allows teams to visualize, share and take action on data from their existing bases. This particular feature is available for all Airtable users.
You can truly customize the user interface in Airtable, meaning you can create flows that suit your needs.
What Sets Airtable Apart
The most notable feature of Airtable is perhaps its ability to be easily adapted to any organizational needs. Users attest that the program is highly customizable, allowing users to track different processes and create robust databases. I can say that from my own experience, Airtable is highly customizable and can be adapted to meet the needs of just about any project, thanks to its ability to handle so many different data sets.
In addition, Airtable also offers a variety of views, such as calendar, Kanban, gallery, Gantt and spreadsheet views, which provide different ways of filtering, sorting and grouping information. Users can create their views to see what matters to them and monitor and track this information in one centralized location. Airtable’s flexibility is the main selling point for small to medium-sized businesses.
Airtable Pricing
| Free | Team | Business | Enterprise Scale | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starting Monthly Price | $0 | $24 per seat (billed monthly) | $54 per seat (billed monthly) | $70 per seat or $21,000 annually for a team of 25 |
| Unlimited Bases | Yes | 50,000 records per base | 125,000 records per base | 500,000 records per base |
| Extension per Base | Not available | Access to all extensions | Access to all extensions | Access to all extensions |
| Sync Integrations | Not available | Access to all standard sync integrations | Access to all standard sync integrations | Salesforce and Jira on-premises sync integrations |
| Records per Base | 1,000 | 50,000 | 125,000 | 500,000 |
| Attachments per Base | 1GB | 20GB | 100GB | 1000GB |
| Revision and Snapshot History | Two weeks | One year | Two years | Three years |
| Custom-branded Forms | - | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Gantt and Timeline Views | - | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Enterprise-wide Admin Panel and Add-On Professional Services | - | - | - | ✓ |
Airtable is not the most competitive project management software in terms of pricing. The Free plan is good for five editors and unlimited bases with 1,000 records per base. The interface designer is available and you can upload 1GB of attachments. You also have access to the full suite of visualization tools. However, you can do better for your team by choosing ClickUp’s free plan if you need a free option. You can learn more in our full ClickUp review or our ClickUp vs. Airtable comparison.
While Airtable’s paid plans offer numerous features, the plans are far more expensive than similar plans found on monday.com and Notion. You can save a little money by signing up for one of Airtable’s yearly plans, but price-wise, I can’t help but think there are options with similar or better features for less outlay. Do your due diligence and shop around. If, after researching, you decide Airtable is right for you, awesome, but please do look at other options.
Airtable Free Plan
Airtable’s Free plan is ideal for individuals and small teams who are new to Airtable. The plan provides unlimited bases, allows read-only users and up to five creators or editors. Free users also have access to the interface designer and one extension per base.
Airtable has done a good job of breaking down features by plan on its website.
Airtable Team Plan
The Airtable Team Plan is ideal for teams that want to build custom applications to manage their workflows efficiently. With access to all extensions, all standard sync integrations, 50,000 records per base and 20GB of attachments per base, teams can manage a vast amount of data.
Airtable Business Plan
Airtable’s Business plan is designed to provide advanced features for teams and organizations that require customization and efficient team management. At $54 per seat per month, billed monthly, this plan offers access to all extensions per base, all standard sync integrations, 125,000 records per base and 100GB of attachments per base.
Additionally, users can benefit from Gantt and Timeline views, SAML-based single sign-on, granular interface permissions, two-year revision and snapshot history, personal and locked views, and field and table editing permissions.
Airtable Enterprise Scale Plan
The Airtable Enterprise Scale Plan offers organizations a comprehensive suite of features to ensure secure, scalable and customizable workflow management. With everything included in the Pro plan, the Enterprise plan also provides unlimited workspaces per organization and unlimited extensions, along with advanced interface controls and an enterprise-wide admin panel.
Other features, such as Salesforce and Jira on-premises sync integrations, 500,000 records per base and 1000GB of attachments per base, make this plan ideal for departments and organizations that require a connected apps’ platform to stay aligned and move work forward.
Featured Partners
1
monday.com
Yes
From $8 monthly per user
Zoom, LinkedIn, Adobe, Salesforce and more
2
ClickUp
Yes, for unlimited members
$7 per month
Slack, Microsoft Outlook, HubSpot, Salesforce, Timely, Google Drive and more
3
Wrike
Yes
$10 per user per month
Salesforce, Adobe, Miro, Netsuite, QuickBooks, SAP
4
Hubspot
Yes
$15 per seat per month
Zoom, Slack, Google Workspace, QuickBooks and more
Airtable vs. Top Alternatives
| Airtable | monday.com | Notion | Jira | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Forbes Advisor Rating |   | | | |
| Free Plan | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Starting Monthly Price | $24 per seat (billed monthly) | $12 (billed monthly) | $12 per user (billed monthly) | $7.53 per user per month (billed monthly) |
| Timelines | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Gantt Charts | Yes | Yes | Yes | With plugin |
| Kanban Board | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Software Integrations | 36 | 200-plus | 110 | 3,000-plus |
| Dependencies | Yes | Available on Pro and Enterprise plans | Yes | Yes |
| Budgeting Tools | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Customer Support | Email | 24/7 customer support by web form, live chat and call back | 24/7 email and chat support | Email |
| Learn More | -- | -- | On Jira's Website | |
| Read Reviews | -- |
Airtable vs. monday.com
While Airtable has a key focus on data management, monday.com is a popular software that focuses on work and CRM management.
At the core of monday.com are dashboards made up of various building blocks to create the desired structure for each team and its projects. It’s a great choice for businesses that want to manage their work, sales, marketing and CRM processes in one place. Airtable, on the other hand, is often used by businesses that want to create databases for event planning, inventory management and sales data management.
Airtable vs. Notion
Airtable and Notion are two project management software solutions that are designed to make it easier for teams to plan projects, delegate tasks, get things done and meet goals. They, however, have different functions.
Airtable is best for managing structured data, such as production schedules, invoices and inventory, while Notion excels at document organization, such as knowledge management, journals, personal web pages and wiki-style documents. Learn more about Airtable vs. Notion.
Airtable vs. Jira
Jira is primarily used by software development teams, while Airtable is a flexible database tool that can be used for a wide range of data management. Jira allows for task and issue tracking, Agile boards, dashboards and reports, and integrations with other tools. Jira also integrates with Confluence seamlessly, enabling distributed teams to work on documents in real time.
Learn more: Read our full guide to the best Airtable alternatives.
Our Expert Opinion
Airtable is a powerful piece of software that enables project teams to work on data-intensive projects. However, off the bat, I can tell you that Airtable is not always the most intuitive piece of software that you’ll ever use. Still, once you learn how to navigate the platform and put its robust feature set to use, you’ll find that Airtable is a very capable platform.
Ease of Use
Despite an initial learning curve with navigation and a few of the tools—namely, the page designer and figuring out how to link data across tables—using Airtable is straightforward. It’s easy to create projects with templates, and adding tasks with due dates, attachments, assignees and custom fields is painless. Communicating with comments is also hassle-free. No matter the task view in use, data in Airtable is displayed neatly and is easy to decipher.
The Kanban boards in Airtable work exactly as you’d expect them to, and adding project details to cards is straightforward.
I also found creating integrations simple and designing automations straightforward. Integrations just require you to sign in to your accounts to link them, and the automation builder’s graphical interface is intuitive. Within a few minutes, you can link commonly used software and create automated workflows across platforms.
Creating powerful automations that can ease your workload takes just a few minutes.
Airtable is available for web browsers and has dedicated desktop and mobile applications for Windows, macOS, Android and iOS. The Windows and macOS desktop applications are identical to the web browser version. Unfortunately, there is no support for off-line work. There is a workaround that requires you to export data to access it offline, but it’s not ideal.
Airtable’s mobile apps are functional, but they are missing some features.
Regarding the mobile applications, Airtable could do better. On Android and iOS, you cannot access Gantt charts or lists, advanced tools such as page and interface designers, integrations or the automation creator.
Annoyingly, smartphone device rotation is not supported, meaning if you have large data sets, you’ll be scrolling endlessly. However, rotation is supported on tablets. Otherwise, basic features such as project creation, task management, uploading files and commenting are supported in the mobile applications.
Device rotation is not supported on smartphones, which is frustrating.
Overall, Airtable is a well-designed platform with just a few minor issues regarding navigation. If you give yourself time to familiarize yourself with the interface, I think most teams, old and new, will be able to create workflows for numerous projects without much hassle.
Value
Compared to other project management platforms that offer similar feature sets, such as monday.com, ClickUp and Asana, Airtable is expensive. However, if you need the ability to create relational databases and sort vast amounts of data, you might find the price of entry to be reasonable. My advice would be to take advantage of the free trials on offer for numerous platforms to see if they do what you need before making a commitment to Airtable.
Customer Service and Support
Airtable offers its customers a variety of support options, ranging from self-service educational resources to direct assistance from its internal support team. Its self-service resources include a help center with product and support documentation, FAQs, troubleshooting guides and feature overviews.
Airtable does not, however, offer phone support and primarily provides support over email. One thing to keep in mind is that email support is only for teams using the Business and Enterprise Scale plans.
During my trial, I accessed the AI chatbot (in-product support) numerous times and was whisked away to resources that helped me solve most problems. I also requested help from the email support team. I received a response to a technical question just before the 24-hour mark. The response was excellent, as the agent provided plenty of tips to help me solve my problem. While I would prefer faster response times, 24 to 48 hours seems to be par for the course these days.
Reputation
Check out well-known review sites, such as Capterra and G2, and you’ll see that Airtable has a solid reputation. Many users praise the multiple ways they can visualize data, the automation builder and Airtable’s ability to link data across tables. However, on Trustpilot, Airtable’s score has plummeted. Users are frustrated with the slow turnaround times from customer support, while others are claiming to have been charged multiple times for canceled accounts.
From my own experience, I can say I haven’t experienced any major delays related to customer service and that most user reviews fall in line with my own experience. Overall, I would say Airtable’s reputation is in good standing.
John Iwuozor and Kelly Main contributed to this article.
Featured Partners
1
monday.com
Yes
From $8 monthly per user
Zoom, LinkedIn, Adobe, Salesforce and more
2
ClickUp
Yes, for unlimited members
$7 per month
Slack, Microsoft Outlook, HubSpot, Salesforce, Timely, Google Drive and more
3
Wrike
Yes
$10 per user per month
Salesforce, Adobe, Miro, Netsuite, QuickBooks, SAP
4
Hubspot
Yes
$15 per seat per month
Zoom, Slack, Google Workspace, QuickBooks and more
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
What is Airtable good for?
Airtable is a great tool for organizing and managing data in a visual and intuitive way. It can be used for a wide range of purposes, such as project management, CRM, event planning and content creation.
Is Airtable a good tool?
Yes, Airtable is a highly rated tool that has received positive reviews from users and experts alike. It has been praised for its ease of use, flexibility and versatility. Airtable is used by individuals, teams and organizations across various industries, from startups and SMBs to Fortune 500 companies.
Is Airtable better than Excel?
Airtable and Excel are both powerful tools, but they have different strengths and use cases. Airtable is better suited for collaborative work, visual organization of data and real-time updates, whereas Excel is better suited for complex calculations, advanced data analysis and financial modeling. Depending on your specific needs, one tool may be better suited than the other.
Is Airtable better than Google Sheets?
Airtable and Google Sheets are similar tools in that they both offer spreadsheet-like functionality. However, Airtable is better suited for complex data organization, collaboration and customization, whereas Google Sheets is better suited for data analysis, reporting and integration with other Google products.
