At its core, Airtable is a relational database tool with extensive collaboration features. But before you brush it off as boring and too complicated because of the word database, know that Airtable uses simple language, friendly color schemes, and helpful icons throughout its interface. It’s also versatile enough to manage workflows, track and organize inventories, plan events, and much more. A host of integration options and worthwhile AI features round out the experience. Airtable is somewhat expensive, but it still earns our Editors’ Choice award among collaboration apps thanks to its flexibility and approachable design.
What Can You Do With Airtable?
Airtable is an online platform where a group of collaborators can store, share, and collaboratively edit information. The information might be ideas, inventory, tasks, or something else. This all might sound vague, but below are some examples of how you might use it.
(Credit: Airtable/PCMag)
You probably already know that you can put information into an online spreadsheet, such as Google Sheets, and invite people to view or edit it with you. That sheet could contain very simple information, such as a list of names and addresses. Or it could be an elaborate financial accounting system that links to other sheets and so forth. Airtable has plenty in common with collaborative online spreadsheets, except for two major differences: First, Airtable lets you manage databases rather than spreadsheets (there’s a difference in complexity and purpose). Second, Airtable is much more user-friendly than a spreadsheet.
A database is nothing more than a set of things grouped together. For example, you could use Airtable to manage work, such as updating articles on a website. You might start by creating a database with a table that lists all the articles on your site that need an update. You could then design the records in said table to have fields for the name of the article, its URL, the original author, publication date, update deadline, and so forth. Next, you could invite editors and writers into the database to assign themselves work and maybe tick a checkbox in a record to indicate when they’re done updating an article.
That’s just one example. Airtable comes with a helpful selection of templates to give you more ideas about how to use it. Other templates include a Bug Tracker, Employee Onboarding, Nonprofit Grant Tracker, Product Launch, Social Media Calendar, and Wedding Planning.
When it comes to managing personal collections, such as keeping track of your vinyl records, how you categorize them, what year they were recorded, and so forth, you can certainly use Airtable. You just have to be willing to set aside the time to set it up in a way that suits your needs and manually add new items. If you prefer convenience over flexibility, look for a different app that specifically supports your type of collection (such as Discogs for music).
How Much Does Airtable Cost?
Airtable has four plan types: Free, Team, Business, and Enterprise Scale. The company offers discounts on the Teams plan for organizations in nonprofit work and education. Qualifying college and university students can also get between 6 and 24 months of complimentary Airtable access based on their expected graduation date.
The free Airtable plan lets you create an unlimited number of Bases (databases) with up to 1,000 records and maintain one Workspace (collections of bases). Free users can invite five editors, 50 commenters, and an unlimited number of collaborators with Read Only permission. Each base supports up to 1GB of storage, which should be fine if you aren’t managing hefty attachments. Otherwise, this tier limits you to two weeks of revision and snapshot history and 100 automation runs per month. Automations encompass actions, such as sending notifications or creating calendar entries in response to a trigger. You can think of it like this: “When X happens, do Y automatically.” Each time one of these action sequences occurs counts as a run.
(Credit: Airtable/PCMag)
The Team version ($20 per person per month, billed annually) lets you add up to 50,000 records per Base and invite as many editors and commenters as you like. You also get 12 months of revision and snapshot history, 20GB of storage space per Base, and 25,000 automation runs per month.
The Business account (costs $45 per person per month, billed annually) allows you to create an unlimited number of Workspaces, add 125,000 records to each Base, and upload 100GB worth of files per Base. You also get 100,000 automation runs per month, email support, and two years of revision and snapshot history.
You have to contact the company for Enterprise Scale pricing. This plan simply expands upon most of the limits from the Business account and adds administration controls.
Keep in mind that the Airtable AI component adds an extra cost ($6 per person per month) to all plans, though you can try it for free as of this review. It unlocks tools for categorizing feedback and assets, generating draft content, summarizing meeting notes and articles, and translating text.
Alternatives to Airtable
Airtable’s plans are pricey (especially the higher-end ones), though given its unique functionality, it’s difficult to compare it directly with other apps.
Smartsheet (starting at $9 per person per month, billed annually) takes a similar, spreadsheet-like approach to collaboration and can also handle project management.
Another app that shares some similarities but is not, strictly speaking, a database management tool is Monday.com. Paid versions cost between $9 and $19 per person per month, billed annually. Just keep in mind that you have to pay for licenses in preset batches (for example, 20 rather than 17).
Although it’s not a relational database, Asana also manages workflows and provides some project management-like functionality. Paid accounts start at $13.49 per person per month.
Getting Started With Airtable
Airtable works on the web and is available via dedicated apps for Android, iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and Windows. Signing up for an account takes little more than an email address and password. Once you have an account, you can start creating Workspaces and Bases. As mentioned, Workspaces are how you organize Bases. So, for example, you might create a Workspace for different teams in your organization or separate ones for work and personal projects.
You can start building a Base from scratch, use a template, or import data from somewhere else. Airtable supports imports from Apple Numbers, CSV files, Google Sheets, and Excel. For smaller databases, you can even copy and paste content into a pop-up window. We tested this feature with a database that had just a handful of columns but more than 400 rows, and it worked without a hitch. Getting data from calendars, contacts lists, and task management apps (Asana, Trello, and Monday.com) is also possible.
(Credit: Airtable/PCMag)
The next step is to customize your database. When you view it in grid format, should any number of rows or columns be frozen? What type of values do you want at the heading of each column? Airtable keeps this customization simple by incorporating intuitive icons.
The ability to create and save custom views in Airtable is another key feature, and one that further supports collaboration. Airtable gives you an abundance of tools for filtering and sorting what you see. You can easily switch between the default Grid view, in which your data appears almost like a table, and Calendar, Form, List, Gallery (customizable cards), Gantt, Kanban, and Timeline options. For reference, the Gantt view shows a schedule of dependent tasks over time, whereas the Timeline view allows you to visualize any set of records over time, grouped by any field. Airtable provides information about all the view types and how to configure them.
Database Records
Records in Airtable expand into full view to show all their details without the page reloading or a new window opening. Once you open a record, you can add more information to it, edit it, and so forth. You can’t see all these details easily from the Grid view.
For example, in an inventory database of your farming equipment, the Grid view lets you easily look over a list of everything you own and other important values that you want to see at a glance. Expand any one record, however, and you see all the details about that piece of equipment, such as an uploaded receipt from when you first bought it, a link to the manufacturer information or warranty, notes about when you last ran maintenance on it, and more.
To upload attachments, simply drag and drop them onto the record. The expanded view also has a place for comments, where you can use @ symbols before people’s names to get their attention. You can also link one record to another in the same database to consolidate information. If you want to link a record to another in a different database, you have to set up the Airtable Sync feature. Team users can set up one-way syncs, but Business and Enterprise Scale subscribers can configure two-way and multi-source syncing.
Although Airtable offers many options for organizing your data and keeping track of your projects, there are some formatting limitations. To enable rich text, for example, you have to go to a Base, pick a specific field, choose to edit it, switch from Single Line Text to Long Text, and toggle the rich text formatting button. Unfortunately, you can’t do this for the primary field in your table, however. Using Markdown is possible in Airtable, too, but only in a few areas. Text fields support up to 100,000 characters, which should be enough for the majority of purposes.
Collaboration is a key part of Airtable, but so is limiting who can make changes to your database. When you invite others, you, in the Owner/Creator role, can assign them one of four permissions levels:
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Creators have full access to the database, including the ability to change other people’s permission levels and delete the whole thing.
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Editors can add, delete, and modify records, comment on records, and add, delete, and modify views. Additionally, they can access the entire database.
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Commenters can access and view the entire database but only comment on records. They can’t make any other changes.
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Read-only users can view the database and records but can’t make any changes or add comments.
Here’s an example of how you might collaborate in Airtable: Let’s say you have a database for assigning and tracking work. You could create a column with the field type Collaborator and then assign any of your collaborators to the task. You could also link to a table with all the names of people who can complete this type of work. That way, when you need to assign a job, the list of possibilities is right there. As you become more familiar with Airtable, its collaboration abilities become more useful.
(Credit: Airtable)
We like how Airtable lets you set up progress bars for everyone to see. This is extremely easy to do and requires you to only add a percentage column in any of your grid views. From the field settings page, you can then choose to display it as a progress bar. You can even go as far as to create conditions and assign specific colors to show your progress. By simply typing 50% in the field, you can show that you’re halfway to completing a task.
Automations and the Apps Marketplace
Airtable’s automations feature has evolved significantly over the years. Tons of triggers are now available, such as “When a button is clicked” or “At a scheduled time,” to name a few. When you sync Airtable with the likes of Google Calendar and Outlook, those apps can become triggers, too. For instance, you can choose to create a new record in one of your databases when a new event pops up on your calendar.
(Credit: Airtable/PCMag)
Another useful component is the Apps Marketplace. Apps are first- and third-party plug-ins for your Airtable account. For instance, you can add Chart, Pivot Table, Time Tracker, and URL Preview apps. Some apps are more ambitious, such as Page Designer, which helps incorporate fields from a record into a beautiful page layout. The Typeform app can generate forms and import resources, while Pexels lets you browse for and attach free stock photos.
AI Features
Airtable AI brings a couple of nifty capabilities to the platform. In any of your Workspaces, for example, you can use Airtable Cobuilder to create a so-called app. In essence, this feature takes you through a few steps to create the exact database you need. You start with a suggestion from Airtable or an idea you come up with, and you can even import spreadsheets, an actual contract, or a presentation.
If you want to build an Editorial Calendar, for instance, Airtable takes a few seconds to generate the tables you are likely to want. In this instance, Airtable proposed several primary tables to work with: Articles, Reviews, and Publishing Schedule. It also suggested Authors, Editors, Feedback, Images, and Topics. You can pick whichever tables suit your needs. Once you hit “Create,” Airtable generates a database for which you can populate whatever information you need. Airtable can also use AI to categorize information from your projects or route projects to the right people based on their skills. We couldn’t test the latter since we didn’t have a team with enough history.
(Credit: Airtable/PCMag)
Otherwise, you can use AI for more common tasks such as summarizing, translating, or writing content. We found these features extremely useful. Summarization is helpful for tasks with tons of comments, and the AI tool did a good job of generating a short description of the notes we put in a specific task. The translation feature worked fine, too.
Airtable says it doesn’t retain customer data or use it to train current and future LLMs, which is good for privacy.
Integration Options
Airtable can connect with lots of other online services, such as Box, Dropbox, GitHub, Google Drive, Salesforce, Slack, WordPress, and Zendesk. You can even connect your Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn accounts to manage posts and uploads.
If a native integration isn’t available for the app or service you want to use, you can try connecting it via IFTTT or Zapier. As a last resort, you can contact the company for access to its API.
Verdict: Relational Databases Made Simple
Airtable might be the least intimidating database management tool out there. It’s easy to grasp, and an array of templates and tutorials help you explore all the ways you can use the system. Many of the add-on AI features are legitimately helpful, and collaboration and permissions management is straightforward. Just keep in mind that higher-tier accounts can get pricey. Airtable might not be the right tool for every data set, though its highly customizable design and powerful capabilities make it an Editors’ Choice winner.
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The Bottom Line
Airtable is an intuitive database tool that lets you and your team easily collaborate and manage information about anything.
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