What do you like best about Airtable?
Airtable makes it easy for non-technical people to post, control, and work with their company's data. We've been working with Airtable for just under a year now, currently on the Business plan. Our organization has around 25 people, and we have a lot of bases. It's been a huge upgrade over our history of using CRMs as data management tools, and we've fully replaced tools like Trello. We set a major goal last year to unify our divisions and workspaces to use a single source of truth, and Airtable has generally been perfect for this goal.
Interfaces - Interfaces are generally great! They give us a means to build custom business logic and interactive pages without too much fuss, no code needed. Interfaces in their current form are good for nearly everything we need and make our employees more effective, obscuring out the spreadsheet-like base for a more familiar SaaS dashboard like experience.
The ability to create public views without adding seats has been great. If we need to share information about our products with contractors, customers, etc, we can do this safely.
AI fields are generally good under specific use cases. For example, if you needed to translate a product description to Spanish, or parse out the first and last names from a messy full name field where traditional techniques are unreliable.
Realtime collaboration features - Bit of a pro and a con. Text fields are collaborative, like a google doc. This is great if multiple people are collaborating on assets, eliminating the annoyance of saving work constantly. The downside is that this makes webhook based change triggers impossible without custom infrastructure. More on this in the dislike section.
Native twilio text sending automation actions have been a huge time saver. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
What do you dislike about Airtable?
Monthly automation limits, unbelievably low automation limit per base, native automation editor doesn't solve the majority of the problems we have without exfiltrating to a third party platform like n8n or pipedream. Ability to run custom scripts helps a lot, but the automation limit is a hard thing to work around without two-way sync.
Too many features locked behind paid plans
Interfaces are generally good, but the inability to inject custom JS/HTML makes me hesitate to use interfaces for complex projects. I've built many websites that use the API to interface with data because interfaces just aren't robust enough.
Difficult to work with webhook behaviours - Because the updates to records are realtime, it's not straightforward to rely on webhooks to notice changes to records as one would do with most other tools. It can be done, but airtable sends the webhooks as chunks of changes, so it's on your developers to parse out the changes over time that you may need for analytics or triggering workflows in third party platforms. We're unfortunately limited to techniques like clustering and polling to observe changes, potentially restricting execution speeds when we're working with third party tools to get around the issues with native automations.
Omni - Lately, Airtable's been pushing their upgraded AI agent, claiming it's capable of building business-ready automations, bases, and interfaces. This has been entirely untrue in my experience. Every single time I've used Omni, it's either been incapable of performing the task or built something that simply doesn't work or build infrastructure that you can't work with long term. The pressure to use Omni continues to increase with every update, and every time I try it again, it fails.
Recent UI changes - Bit of a sore subject for those in my organization who build stuff. When you're working with multiple bases, it used to be pretty easy to tell which one you were in based on the header color. This has been removed, making more room for the unhelpful Omni tool.
Record Limits - Not a problem for our organization so far, but this may make certain projects not feasible.
Portals are too expensive - Portals is a feature intended to allow you to share the ability to see and edit base data without paying for a full seat and maintain branding, which is excellent! Unfortunately, it's very expensive and therefore makes little sense competitively. Much of what we would be interested in using Portals for, we can't justify because of the price. Instead we work around it with tools like Fillout or Softr. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.