Review
We rebuilt three business processes in Airtable — a content pipeline, a supplier list and a recruitment tracker. Two were transformative. One should have stayed a spreadsheet.
The best no-code database for teams who have outgrown spreadsheets but do not want an application built. Watch the per-user pricing and record limits — they decide whether it is a bargain or an expensive habit.
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The spreadsheet that runs your business is a well-known genre: forty tabs, three colour conventions, one person who understands it. Airtable exists for the moment that spreadsheet becomes a liability. We tested it by rebuilding three real processes and keeping score.
Articles, writers, categories and publication dates as linked tables meant a writer's workload, a category's coverage and this month's schedule became three views of the same data rather than three files that disagreed with each other.
Adding an intake form for commissioning removed an email thread entirely. Automations posted new assignments to Slack. Nobody has opened the old spreadsheet since.
Contracts, contacts, renewal dates and spend, with an interface page the finance lead can open without touching the underlying data. Renewal reminders alone caught two auto-renewals we would have missed.
Twelve candidates, one hiring round, three weeks. Building the base took longer than the process it managed. Airtable earns its keep on recurring, multi-person, long-running processes — not one-off projects.
Twenty dollars per user per month adds up fast when half your team only ever reads the data. Interfaces help — viewers can be cheaper — but model the cost before committing. Record limits per base also matter: crossing them mid-project means restructuring, not just upgrading.
Airtable is the right answer when your data has relationships and your process has repetition. When it has neither, Google Sheets is still free and still fine.
| Free plan | 1,000 records per base, unlimited bases |
|---|---|
| Team plan | $20/user/mo annually, 50,000 records |
| Business plan | $45/user/mo annually |
| Views | Grid, kanban, calendar, gallery, timeline, Gantt |
| Interfaces | Custom app-like pages for viewers |
| API | REST API and webhooks on all plans |
Scores from our own testing. Prices are launch RRP in USD.
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