Happy to see these guys doing well. Got turned onto their product middle of last year and have started using it for all sorts of stuff. Its a great middle ground between an excel file and building a custom app for things. Super flexible with very little learning curve. Girlfriend and I even use it to track which wines we've tried, like, and ratings and stuff for them.
I've had success using Airtable with an email flow for an applicant tracking system. I:
-posted a job ad with a specific reply-to email address
-every time an applicant wrote to that email address, a row would automatically be added in an Airtable base
-I would review their application and if I wanted to pass them on to a next step, I would select a pre-defined drop-down value in their row in the Airtable base to mark them as something like "Go" or "No go".
-This would trigger Zapier to send an email to the applicant with instructions on how to take our screening questionnaire in SurveyGizmo
-Depending on the results of the questionnaire, I would select another drop-down value, triggering another email, etc.
It wasn't perfect but it did help me to automate what had been a very painful process.
I'm asking sincerely, since most of open examples I see of people using Airtable and Fieldbook and other similar software is for these simple use cases -- in fact for tracking wines or whatever, a spreadsheet is maybe much better.
Now when I tried to use Fieldbook for a somewhat complex bunch of data that gets currently added, 5 tables with references between them it has quickly bloated and become slow to the point of not being usable anymore.
So I'm left with the impression that people mostly use these apps for simple use cases where a spreadsheet, or a Trello board, or even a text file would be better; and that complex use-cases are not supported at all -- as they wouldn't be in a spreadsheet.
> Now when I tried to use Fieldbook for a somewhat complex bunch of data that gets currently added, 5 tables with references between them it has quickly bloated and become slow to the point of not being usable anymore.
I've had the same experience, glad it's not just me. It was a few months ago so I don't remember the exact details, but I could not model the complex relationships I wanted in Fieldbook (which I've used before) or Airtable (my first time). I didn't gel with the Airtable UI either.
Excel still is excellent for the most tasks for most of us. It's not going away any time soon. Google certainly has tried with google sheets. They all might just co-exist in harmony fulfill each individual niche even with some overlap.
We've tried out Airtable but ended up using Podio and eventually, Fusioo - http://www.fusioo.com. More of a database (not spreadsheet) for bigger companies though and they don't run a freemium model.
I would suggest taking look at Quick Base [1]. We've been using it for years and I've found it hits the sweet spot for us in the complex spreadsheet/light database space.
I've been following Airtable for a while and I have high hopes they continue their upward trajectory. I like where they are going, and they seem like the most likely alternative if we were to move, but Quick Base still seems to have a leg up in a lot of areas. Cross Application/Database Connections, Webhooks Support, and automated table sync from Dropbox/Box/SFTP just to name a few.
I agree. I think Airtable's interface (ease of use, responsiveness) is leagues ahead of Quickbase, but Quickbase still offers a more complete feature set, and in many cases one missing feature can cripple a use case (e.g., QB offers predecessor/successor dependencies for project tracking by linking to other records in the same table, Airtable does not).
all the alternatives are fairly mediocre, I tried them all. The closest thing is google spreadsheets, which really is not designed for RDBMS / light database work. You can read my review on alternativeto.net as well.
I see above you mention moving a lot of your business processes to it from Excel and Access. What would you do if Airtable was acquired and sunset? I'm in risk management, so a lot of my day to day is planning for the unexpected, hence my concern and interest in alternatives (perhaps an open source front end paired with OpenFaaS on the backend for integrations).
Ideally, airtable should download a copy of all my database files into dropbox at least once/day, but that feature doesn't exist.
It should also have a automatic file downloader backup (e.g. when you upload an image, it goes to their amazonS3 server → that should ideally be backed up locally as well). Doesn't exist either. Just have to use the plugin I wrote for the time being
Another thing from a risk management standpoint. Airtable has only 1 API key, and that key has access to EVERYTHING. If someone knows both your API key + your airtable's base ID, they can do anything with it. Issue GET requests for data, PATCH and update values in your database, etc.
You're sounding like an irrational Airtable fanboy here.
At least Fieldbook and probably also Ragic are very similar to Airtable and fill the exact same niche, with some small diferences, and they're not mediocre at all.
Probably true, I am extremely picking about UI/UX and have opinionated views on software.
Airtable does have much better documentation (case-studies, intro videos, API docs, forums), better marketing, wider adoption and growing numbers of features, these were some of the reasons I chose it over other options at similar price points / features.
Normally when I adopt a software for long term use, I benchmark as many aspects as I possibly can (e.g. setup a simple db schema, see how many metric reviews on reddit|slant|g2|alternativeto.net there are, dig through all of their documentation quickly to see how easy or difficult it is to search things, check how user friendly forums are, compare features, gauge their business-level decisions / longevity, etc)
My use of "mediocre" might be overstated here, they are fine alternatives just not to my liking.
Airtable is one of those products that really changes the way you work or even think about building workflows. I use it as a middleware for uploading content to a side project website I own. Nothing out there is as flexible and easy to use as this (their API is also a piece of cake.)
They care deeply about their user experience and are always shipping features at an impressive pace. Really happy to see them growing.
Simply put. Airtable is like Smartsheets but for cool people :D
Glad to see this company get more funding. Last year I ported all of our companys excel and access files over to airtable. Currently tweaking with their API to work with a MS-SQL database using amazon Lambda and RDS at the moment.
Their API documentation is fantastic, some of the best I've seen as well. They even have some of the best case studies for workflow management as well, posted on their blog, for setting up a relational database management setup in different use cases.
As a user who's also part of their alpha-test program, its exciting to see all the changes they made this year. They added blocks which lets you add app-like integrations such as forms, kanban, maps integration, page designer (think of mailmerge for word) etc. I personally have only dabbled in about half the things offered here, but its crazy how many things you can do with airtable.
Airtable has lots of potential use cases for startup apps as well, I highly suggest reading this article from a philosophical standpoint. http://sirupsen.com/minimum-viable-airtable/
I use it to manage purchase orders overseas and use it as a traditional product database. Anything that I would use MS-access for I use airtable instead.
I find it useful for tracking people who attend music camps I run, whatever they have chosen, paid for, dietary issues etc. It’s very friendly for setting up things like Booleans, formulas, different types of data, without having to know much. It’s easy to use and easy to share with others. It’s not perfect. But it’s nice.
So if you're going to be putting them in a db, why did you 'port' them to airtable? Wouldn't it be cheaper to store the files on s3 and insert in the db when you get your schema and everything solidified?
sorry I didn't mean "port" literally, I meant it as a slang term. I meant "move everything over".
Airtable uses s3 to manage the file upload assets (I think). I like using Airtable over a traditional RDBMS since its extremely user friendly and easy to update your db schema. I don't have to memorize anything on the backend (E.g. with MS-SQL, it was always in an uphill battle working with sql-server management studio, figuring out what settings I need to tweaked, etc). Airtable's GUI is super intuitive if your familiar with excel / MS-access. It took me a few days to learn and figure out airtable, MS-Access took me about 3 months+.
This and your other comments read like ads. I don't mean to say that you're not being genuine, but when I (and presumably others) read a thread like this and see overly-enthusiastic reviews it raises a degree of skepticism. I wouldn't like to criticise you, especially since you just seem to be trying to inform others about a product you're pleased with, but i think there's a general problem on hn with comments above a certain threshold of complimentariness. Some are obvious shills, but there's a big grey area where it's harder to tell.
Airtable is a fantastic product. We use it religiously.
For those that may be interested, one of Lambda School's students has been building out an ORM for Airtable to abstract away some aspects of the API. https://lambda-school-labs.github.io/Airtable-ORM/
We've used Airtable for replacing various parts of our internal backend dashboards for non-technical people. Syncing over the API + Zapier is doable, but I wish they made two-way sync easier. And the fact that they don't have cross-base lookups is a major pain point.
For anything that requires quick fiddling and no API access, I still prefer traditional spreadsheets. Airtable's strict relational limitations means you cannot quickly enter some static data in an arbitrary field (e.g. a currency exchange rate). This makes quick back-of-the napkin calculations really awkward, even impossible.
Airtable is exactly what https://transpose.com/ Transpose could have been. But better. Been using it for just about everything you can think of. Did not know about the Blocks feature. Awesome. I got fairly good with Transpose until they closed up shop. Fieldbook and Airtable definitely can do things that Trello (cannot do tables) and Evernote (can do tables but very limited) cannot. There is a huge middle ground between Goog Spreadsheets and MSFT Excel. I hope they do not sell out to anyone. The day they do will be the end of their flexibility.
I dont know, I rely on Excel for everything in my day to day work, and it is so flexible and terrible at the same time, I would gladly pay for a different tool that makes me look 2x smarter. The whole corporate world that insists on doing something 'in Excel' is a ripe market for such an IPOable business
The article literally says that's not the case. They hope to get an IPO. I know doesn't mean it's 100% true but it's still right there.
"Airtable isn't yet profitable, Liu said, but can be "cash flow positive at a moments notice." And an IPO is the eventual goal, he says, because he doesn't want to sell his company again. "
To be fair, lots of founders say this to press, and tell a completely different story to investors. I don't know anything about Howie Liu but in general there's roughly zero correlation between what a founder tells reporters about acquisition plans and reality.
I know a bit about that, as I tried both. Spoiler: We kept using Airtable and Dropbox Paper instead.
Pros Coda:
- As implied above: it is quite good at merging the features of a "word processor" (more like Google Drive, Dropbox Paper) with Airtable like functionality (Spreadsheets that are very easy to use, filter, display differently... I.e. building small pseudo apps. Basically: you can add text above and below your "Airtable"
- Multiple documents inside a document (navigation on the left side). Pretty good for Wiki like things
Pros Airtable:
- Better in displaying data (colors etc), adding attachements, e and other visual benefits that make it accessible to non nerds.
- I know the pricing model. Coda doesn't tell (me) what they will charge. I simply didn't want to become dependent on something I don't know I can afford (many users)
Hang in there - I applied for the Coda beta several months ago, but only got the Beta invite a few days ago.
First impressions, quite good really, but we've only created some small tables and pages in it so far. I am a developer by trade, and usually eschew apps that are based around "programming for non programmers", but I can see that Coda IS quite useful for people who are non technical. I especially like that I can create 'sub views' from a master table to share with users so they can see a summarised view pertinent only to them.
Biggest drawback, as another commenter has pointed out here, is that I have no idea what the costs (if any) will be for our company once they finish the Beta. For that reason we will avoid putting anything mission critical on there until we know more.
I like airtable, but the per-base row limits (50,000 before you reach "contact us for pricing") are too small for many of the things I'd like to use it for.
And there's something a bit odd in their pricing model, isn't there?
The plus tier is $10 per user per month with a limit of 5,000 records per base; the pro tier is $20 per user per month, with a limit of 50,000 records per base.
Suppose I want to use it to replace a spreadsheet where our staff record some kind of work they have done.
If I have a staff of 2 I can pay airtable $20 per month on the plus tier and each person can do work generating 2,500 records in a shared space before I have to upgrade.
But if I have a staff of 50 and I pay airtable $500 per month on the plus tier, each person can only generate 100 records before I have to upgrade. Even if I pay them $1000 per month on the pro tier I'm still worse off on this metric at 1000 records per person.
I was wondering about this too but I _assumed_ the users compounded the limit versus divide it. Does anyone know for sure how the limits work with multiple users?
Bases are essentially full databases. You can have as many bases as you want. You can share your base (e.g. view only, not edit) to anybody [nonpaying users, nonlogged on users, etc]
If your base has 5,001 records, only users with a $20/month plan can edit that base.
Everyone in your company to my understanding has to have the same plan though. So, you can't have one staff member at a $10/month plan, and another at $20/month plan.
if they are comparing Airtable with Spreadsheet, why there is a constraint on # of records unlike spreadsheet(although Excel sheets are limited to 1.048m or so records per sheet but that's plenty I think to work with)? They do have another constraint for free account allowing only 2GB storage but then that alone should be enough and they should just allow adding as many rows as one can until one gets maxed out with this 2 GB storage.
My guess is that it's mostly a technical limitation (and that the reason why services of this sort haven't taken over the world is that everyone else runs into a similar limitation).
And there's cost of its underline infrastructure, presumably it's on AWS or Azure, all cost real $$$. Users with free account, I will assume a bulk load of them, even though limited to 1200 records per base, the resources cost still eat into their bottom line.
It's also a provisioning problem. Let's assuming that the new pricing model is based on usage per user, like 50,000 records per user, and how are you suppose to track each individual record, even that is possible, it would not be very practical as the every CRUD operations would require a record count referenced to the user. Keep X records per Base makes the operation a lot easier and technically much more feasible.
I wouldn't suggest anything so complicated. Rather (if it isn't a technical limitation), I'd suggest they increase the per-base limit for customers who pay for more users, or else add a third paid tier above 'pro'.
Yup I considered migrating from google sheets but limits seemed too low for what I wanted. Sheets isn’t great, I split to multiple spreadsheets when I hit the limit but it works for me
Actually you can do a lot of amazing stuff already with google sheets, like sheet2site.com and sheetsu.com. However, Google api caps the free daily request to 1000.
I think they realize that most orgs that are creating a lot of records will share credentials to reduce cost, so they need multiple tier limits to upsell. I’m okay with this because we share an Airtable login. :)
I don’t know. They have some features that use authorship, but if enough people use a custom select column to handle assignments, etc, I could see them making login share more difficult. In a large enough organization, login share is impossible to maintain because of the need for access control.
Wearing my SaaS product manager hat I’d say shoot them an email describing your expectations and suggesting your price point. I’ve rejigged product packaging myself in response to high quality/specific presales feedback and reached additional market segments as a result.
And conversely, I have an unmarketed plan with <well known IaaS provider> despite being a tiny customer with no leverage - the point being that the packages marketed aren’t always the complete range available. But you have to ask.
This is especially true for SaaS where the margins are huge and business models are designed to simplify and obfuscate the true costs of running a business.
The whole charged-per-user SaaS culture is stupid.
SaaS had to be priced somehow, then someday someone came up with the idea of charging per-user and everybody followed that up, but it is not smart. Most SMB end up sharing accounts, which makes your product look worse than it actually is and at the same time makes your users miserable.
I think for many companies at least it's just the easiest way to somehow approximate value created for the customer. When the business matures one could argue that services should gain a stronger measurement of value created for their customers and charge correlating to this.
With regards to the SMB scenario I agree - and probably it would make sense for many services to have a base bundle tier with 5 or so accounts. And then price it based on some minimum value created. But also hard to do this if your competition is offering 1 user for $2.99.
SMBs work that way, but it's an interesting way into the enterprise through "dark procurement" (essentially teams going rogue, buying a service without IT's knowledge, IT finds out, a business case is made... and boom... 2000 paying users instead of 1, having managed to subvert the usual pitching processes).
I agree, it's not right for a lot of products (some of which are better charged at a flat fee, or a per "thing" basis), but it's not a stupid decision for a lot of businesses.
I agree with you that per-user pricing doesn't make for an ideal SMB experience. We specifically avoided it for our SaaS tool for the reasons you mention.
That said, the costs of SMBs getting away with one login do not outweigh the benefits of getting to charge enterprises per user. Most of these tools with free tiers and per-user pricing (Slack, Airtable) make most of their money from enterprise, not SMB.
Therefore I don't agree with you that it's "stupid" or "not smart".
As an avid Excel and GSheet user, it's nice and slick with a few more bells and whistles. Very clean and probably good for an organization with members who are not very good with sheets in general or have a hard time mapping data mentally; akin to a better designed SmartSheet.
I wish our company had this 10 years ago. Everybody was using and mis-using Excel for everything, whether it's requirements, project tracking, documentation, manually updated dashboard and dashboard.
We're not abusing Excel anymore, but we've ended up specialized software for everything. Ironically we've lost ability to create something that is exactly tailored for each person's need.
I don't know man, I might not be the target audience (MD of a software company) but I just don't get this.
It seems only slightly more useful than say a Google spreadsheet on a platform that yes might have blocks and templates but I didn't see anything there that made me want to switch away from Google Spreadsheets, Trello and a couple of other systems I use to run my 20 person £1mm turnover business.
I'll keep it in mind but having played with Airtable I just don't see the value. Still, wish them all the best.
> Over the next two weeks we visited dozens of Excel customers, and did not see anyone using Excel to actually perform what you would call “calculations.” Almost all of them were using Excel because it was a convenient way to create a table.
> What was I talking about? Oh yeah… most people just used Excel to make lists. Suddenly we understood why Lotus Improv, which was this fancy futuristic spreadsheet that was going to make Excel obsolete, had failed completely: because it was great at calculations, but terrible at creating tables, and everyone was using Excel for tables, not calculations.
If you view it from the lens that most Excel users employ the spreadsheet to create lists and tables (data organization), then Airtable is one way to improve that workflow.
Yes, people use excel to create databases without having to fuss about data-types and referential integrity (and without knowing they would even have to fuss about them).
Using Excel spreadsheets multi user database instead of as a spreadsheet calculator is one of my pet peeves. Unfortunately it's also exactly what happens when organisations are lacking in processes and tools and less technical people have to try to make their own. So, I welcome any app that actually give people the multi user database that they actually need instead of e-mailing excel files to each other and losing track of versions.
If that's the target audience, then I see Airtable failing also. Surely 80% of the benefit of an excel spreadsheet, or google sheets, for a common user is how bare bones and simple to navigate the two products are?
"Oh hey, I just need to fire off some data rapidly in an organized way. Boop, done." And that's the trick, isn't it? The need to rapidly organize previously un-organized data. It's not a case of, "I know exactly how I want to rapidly organize some data."
With Airtable, it would be "I now have to navigate this decoupled spread out GUI and learn what all these abstract terms mean, when all I want to do is calculate how much we spent on ice cream last month."
In essence, it is making the workflow slower for those types of people.
On the other end of the spectrum, from a programmer's point of view, GUI's ALWAYS slow things down. This is why programmers who used VIM / Emacs were faster than those using modern IDE's. It's why hot-keys are important to both technical and non-technical workers. Presentation does not equal productivity. The presentation is what Airtable is pushing as the abstraction for non-technical users.
If the target audience for Airtable is instead small-business startups - then those startups are going to be in for a world of hurt when they need to get into real business development. They will have wasted time, energy, and resources to get set up on a lego platform that they'll need to migrate away from.
Looking at the pricing model and data limitations, there's nothing that would make this a better choice than just hooking up to AWS or something similar, directly. Using Airtable would require maintaining some form of middleware for SPA's...and there's no way in the world that you wouldn't be hitting their caps rapidly. Just an extra cost.
I'm not saying this product won't work well for a market niche, but that niche is a lot smaller than the buzz words thrown around in today's publications.
52M isn’t chump change in funding. Glad to know VC’s think it’s a big problem.
Personally I am working on an Airtable/excel like product but rather than a spreadsheet, you can easily make structured hierarchies. Think rows, which could have more rows, or link to other cells. A very easy way to capture relational data.
You can just start writing stuff in cells Define headings and data types later. Like git, it stores version history, let’s you work offline and let’s you sync with others. Let’s you upload markdown, or pictures and files into cells. Define a stricter schemas later. Restrict editing/viewing of cells based on formulas so others can’t easily break what you’ve created.
I wrote a little manifesto at orows.com and working on a prototype. Once I have about a 100 users, I plan to quit my job and work on it full time.
Think github, but rather than files, an object graph.
It's a lot more user-friendly than Google Sheets, what with the various input methods and the easy 'views' that hide/show/whatever the underlying raw information. Plus, it's really easy to link tables to each other. I might not have looked well enough, but I don't think GSheets can do that without some scripting involved.
I wouldn't compare Airtable to Google Spreadsheets or Excel for that matter. It looks more like a non-buggy Web 2.0 FoxPro, an RDBMS with a user-friendly UX.
I wish it was a Web 2.0 FoxPro. It’s maybe the closest, but the price model is too much.
You could buy foxpro for $1200 and create 100 databases with all sorts of janky workflows used within your small business. Paying $20/user/infinity for lower amounts of records doesn’t quite fit that niche. And so the hacked processes with Google Docs and now Excel365 continue.
Hopefully with this new funding, Airtable can fix their pricing model and become successful as Access was.
For me, it’s a one time fee that I can self host or run against AWS or something of my choosing.
But I’m pretty weird. I suspect one that has really simple and easily measureable prices. Like $500/year for a terabyte of storage in as many bases as you want. This should let most small businesses not worry about cost. Kind of like how FoxPro let people build so many solutions.
The model now is not very predictable so it’s hard for small businesses to use.
I think 365 charges $100/user/year for 1TB. That’s for write/edit permissions. Maybe double that or something. So 5 users would give 5TB total for $1000/year.
Raw storage may not be the right measure, but it is better than cells since it is easier to report on. Just constantly showing raw or logical space.
Imagine if gmail charges by number of email messages in inbox and number of recipients rather than storage. That would be hard to predict.
Yes, this is actually pretty surprising in the hindsight is 20/20 way. I disagree that FoxPro was great, it had too many bugs and issues for that, but the 'concept of FoxPro' was indeed great.
Excel still is excellent for the most tasks for most of us. It's not going away any time soon. Google certainly has tried with google sheets. They all might just co-exist in harmony fulfill each individual niche even with some overlap.
It's an app that sits somewhere between a database and a spreadsheet, bringing the best features of both, that is easily "programmed" by non-programmers, and with a nice looking interface to boot.
During the Sonoma County fires we had over 60 volunteeers editing Airtable verifying shelter information, fire locations, developments, lost and found and more. We essentially put a light Rails app in front of it to serve as a front end for the site sonomafireinfo.com. I don’t think we could have scaled and gotten volunteers onboard as quickly as we did without Airtable.
I think the better question is: during a life-and-death fire rescue effort, is it a better use of time to use Airtable as a backend or to write, deploy, and operate a concurrent editing backend yourself? There's a clear answer here.
Good point but most states have disaster relief infrastructure already in place for events like this? If this was scrounged up the day of it would make sense.
Why do you believe most states have IT-related disaster relief infrastructure in place? I worked for several years in CA govt, I would be surprised if anything beyond the major metros has much in place for coordinating shelters, etc. In fact, the sonoma fires are documented to have had lots of problems with reverse 911.
I have and there was always IT-related disaster plans and policies. But admittedly I have not worked in most states in this capacity and definitely not in CA so my experiences are limited.
I have been eager to explore the available tools for disaster relief because it seems like people scamble to DIY a solution for every disaster. I made my own Firebase relief matchmaking service when we had a 100yr flood a couple years ago. I would love to see easily deployed crowdsourced open-sourced tools that can be used as soon as possible in these scenarios.
If you think local government has IT infrastructure just for disaster operations, or if it does, that you can add a user to it in less than two business weeks, then you haven't worked in local government.
I have worked in local government, and have dealt with these departments. While most cities probably dont have this infrastructure, most states do and open it to local muni's for these exact scenarios. Like I said if they had to create something last minute this is great, I was just surprised at their appreciation to scale something to 60 users.
That state may not be, the one I worked for was, specifically setup to come to the aid of muni's in cases of emergency. But these plans and contingencies were obviously created out of previous tragedy/experiences.
I think scaling it to 60 concurrent users editing Airtable at the same time without a hitch and able to onboard someone to be useful within 10 mins of them coming in the door was what we liked.
Why are people downvoting your question? Seems like a legit thing to ask.
I suspect HN behaves a little like how many folks treat their national army... you can't ask a question that may imply a bad decision during an important human/national event.
÷ "Why wasn't your system able to scale to 60 users during natural calamity?"
~ "How dare you question such a noble cause? Have you ever even worked with govt?" (Downvote)
÷ "Yes I have, we had systems in place that worked you know. Most states do."
~ (oh fuck, she knows what she's talking about) "States and municipals don't cooperate, so fuck off now"
So maybe, instead of attacking the OP, try answering the question directly, more honestly?
Make your points with logic and class people, not assholery.
We didn't want to write a lot of logic and UI when Airtable was a perfectly good DB/Admin backend. Our goal was rapid response. We built a site off the ground in an hour with useful information and onboarding someone with a tool like Airtable was much easier than custom interface.
People=Volunteers.
We had over 130,000 unique visitors to the site relying on us for up to date accurate information.
Airtable seams cool but i have a hard time understanding where in the market they are.
Like between Excel and a relational db app? Not sure about that.
Some things that often fail in excel is:
* You cant easily verify what the user writes.
* It is hard to stop users from destroying the formulas that make it work.
* It becomes slow when the row count starts to go up.
* You cant have user roles where some users is suppose to be able to see one thing and edit another and another user is to edit another thing and see something else.
Sharepoint somewhat handles that with file locking and had some revision history and permissions support. Most people just put spreadsheets on shared folders, so of course they get blown up.
Airtable is basically an enterprise swiss army knife for solving trench-fighting issues. That's basically the market, freeing up developers to handle main projects to make it worth the company's time to employ them.
Some rando department needs a form for their new employees or needs to spreadsheet-collaborate? Instead of building some custom webapp, Airtable is a central point for those kinds of things where a more specialized workflow solution doesn't exist.
Doesn't the article state that the founder of Airtable sold his previous startup to Salesforce and regrets it and doesn't want to go down the same path again?
It's pretty, it works, it's pricey..i like some of the marketing around it and the buzz features they have.
Honestly I found that like a Google spreadsheet with the Blockspring addon works best for most of my scenarios..
P.s. Along the funding they announced a new feature, and the blog post that goes with it has an embedded map that breaks responsiveness on mobile...did no one really double check before announcing a major feature release?
I'm really happy about airtable. My use case is basically "shared access/excel-like with easier row grouping and simple projections". I used the API as well.
The feature I miss most is charts/graphs. Really hope they'll add them one day.
I think Airtable's marketing hasn't always been ideal, because I don't really think of it as a spreadsheet product. In fact, I've actually tried using it to do spreadsheet-like number crunching and it's just not that good at it.
What it really is is a darn-fine visual database that only looks like a spreadsheet (potentially...there are other views as well). The ability to create fairly sophisticated, structured data models along with an easy to way to collaboratively edit that data is pretty impressive. I've been using it both in my freelance business as well as to manage lots of household planning stuff along with my wife, and it's done a great job. I wish the Pro plan were cheaper...I'm only on Plus right now and want the features of the Pro plan. But I understand the need to charge for good tooling. (Also a happy paying customer of Basecamp here.)
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 270 ms ] threadWhat frightened me was exactly that middle ground though, my processes are too tied to the mail think products like streak meet it better.
I will definetly test it
-posted a job ad with a specific reply-to email address
-every time an applicant wrote to that email address, a row would automatically be added in an Airtable base
-I would review their application and if I wanted to pass them on to a next step, I would select a pre-defined drop-down value in their row in the Airtable base to mark them as something like "Go" or "No go".
-This would trigger Zapier to send an email to the applicant with instructions on how to take our screening questionnaire in SurveyGizmo
-Depending on the results of the questionnaire, I would select another drop-down value, triggering another email, etc.
It wasn't perfect but it did help me to automate what had been a very painful process.
I'm asking sincerely, since most of open examples I see of people using Airtable and Fieldbook and other similar software is for these simple use cases -- in fact for tracking wines or whatever, a spreadsheet is maybe much better.
Now when I tried to use Fieldbook for a somewhat complex bunch of data that gets currently added, 5 tables with references between them it has quickly bloated and become slow to the point of not being usable anymore.
So I'm left with the impression that people mostly use these apps for simple use cases where a spreadsheet, or a Trello board, or even a text file would be better; and that complex use-cases are not supported at all -- as they wouldn't be in a spreadsheet.
I've had the same experience, glad it's not just me. It was a few months ago so I don't remember the exact details, but I could not model the complex relationships I wanted in Fieldbook (which I've used before) or Airtable (my first time). I didn't gel with the Airtable UI either.
[alternatives link removed]
I've been following Airtable for a while and I have high hopes they continue their upward trajectory. I like where they are going, and they seem like the most likely alternative if we were to move, but Quick Base still seems to have a leg up in a lot of areas. Cross Application/Database Connections, Webhooks Support, and automated table sync from Dropbox/Box/SFTP just to name a few.
[1] https://www.quickbase.com
https://alternativeto.net/software/airtable/reviews/
Airtable doesn't have an official, automated local backup system yet. Their forum post indicates it as well https://community.airtable.com/t/offline-local-backup/754/77.
Ideally, airtable should download a copy of all my database files into dropbox at least once/day, but that feature doesn't exist.
It should also have a automatic file downloader backup (e.g. when you upload an image, it goes to their amazonS3 server → that should ideally be backed up locally as well). Doesn't exist either. Just have to use the plugin I wrote for the time being
There is a 3rd party solution for backing up airtables using its API. Its on this forum post. https://community.airtable.com/t/zenbackups-airtable-databas.... Personally, I have not used it.
Another thing from a risk management standpoint. Airtable has only 1 API key, and that key has access to EVERYTHING. If someone knows both your API key + your airtable's base ID, they can do anything with it. Issue GET requests for data, PATCH and update values in your database, etc.
At least Fieldbook and probably also Ragic are very similar to Airtable and fill the exact same niche, with some small diferences, and they're not mediocre at all.
Airtable does have much better documentation (case-studies, intro videos, API docs, forums), better marketing, wider adoption and growing numbers of features, these were some of the reasons I chose it over other options at similar price points / features.
Normally when I adopt a software for long term use, I benchmark as many aspects as I possibly can (e.g. setup a simple db schema, see how many metric reviews on reddit|slant|g2|alternativeto.net there are, dig through all of their documentation quickly to see how easy or difficult it is to search things, check how user friendly forums are, compare features, gauge their business-level decisions / longevity, etc)
My use of "mediocre" might be overstated here, they are fine alternatives just not to my liking.
Airtable is one of those products that really changes the way you work or even think about building workflows. I use it as a middleware for uploading content to a side project website I own. Nothing out there is as flexible and easy to use as this (their API is also a piece of cake.)
They care deeply about their user experience and are always shipping features at an impressive pace. Really happy to see them growing.
Simply put. Airtable is like Smartsheets but for cool people :D
As a user who's also part of their alpha-test program, its exciting to see all the changes they made this year. They added blocks which lets you add app-like integrations such as forms, kanban, maps integration, page designer (think of mailmerge for word) etc. I personally have only dabbled in about half the things offered here, but its crazy how many things you can do with airtable.
I also wrote a popular excel VBA script for airtable too, for bulk downloading and renaming images found here on their forum. https://community.airtable.com/t/bulk-image-downloader-and-r....
Airtable has lots of potential use cases for startup apps as well, I highly suggest reading this article from a philosophical standpoint. http://sirupsen.com/minimum-viable-airtable/
On this page, https://airtable.com/templates, there's a database called "Product Catalog". Thats what I use
Airtable uses s3 to manage the file upload assets (I think). I like using Airtable over a traditional RDBMS since its extremely user friendly and easy to update your db schema. I don't have to memorize anything on the backend (E.g. with MS-SQL, it was always in an uphill battle working with sql-server management studio, figuring out what settings I need to tweaked, etc). Airtable's GUI is super intuitive if your familiar with excel / MS-access. It took me a few days to learn and figure out airtable, MS-Access took me about 3 months+.
For those that may be interested, one of Lambda School's students has been building out an ORM for Airtable to abstract away some aspects of the API. https://lambda-school-labs.github.io/Airtable-ORM/
For anything that requires quick fiddling and no API access, I still prefer traditional spreadsheets. Airtable's strict relational limitations means you cannot quickly enter some static data in an arbitrary field (e.g. a currency exchange rate). This makes quick back-of-the napkin calculations really awkward, even impossible.
"Airtable isn't yet profitable, Liu said, but can be "cash flow positive at a moments notice." And an IPO is the eventual goal, he says, because he doesn't want to sell his company again. "
[0]https://coda.io/welcome
Pros Coda: - As implied above: it is quite good at merging the features of a "word processor" (more like Google Drive, Dropbox Paper) with Airtable like functionality (Spreadsheets that are very easy to use, filter, display differently... I.e. building small pseudo apps. Basically: you can add text above and below your "Airtable" - Multiple documents inside a document (navigation on the left side). Pretty good for Wiki like things
Pros Airtable: - Better in displaying data (colors etc), adding attachements, e and other visual benefits that make it accessible to non nerds. - I know the pricing model. Coda doesn't tell (me) what they will charge. I simply didn't want to become dependent on something I don't know I can afford (many users)
First impressions, quite good really, but we've only created some small tables and pages in it so far. I am a developer by trade, and usually eschew apps that are based around "programming for non programmers", but I can see that Coda IS quite useful for people who are non technical. I especially like that I can create 'sub views' from a master table to share with users so they can see a summarised view pertinent only to them.
Biggest drawback, as another commenter has pointed out here, is that I have no idea what the costs (if any) will be for our company once they finish the Beta. For that reason we will avoid putting anything mission critical on there until we know more.
And there's something a bit odd in their pricing model, isn't there?
The plus tier is $10 per user per month with a limit of 5,000 records per base; the pro tier is $20 per user per month, with a limit of 50,000 records per base.
Suppose I want to use it to replace a spreadsheet where our staff record some kind of work they have done.
If I have a staff of 2 I can pay airtable $20 per month on the plus tier and each person can do work generating 2,500 records in a shared space before I have to upgrade.
But if I have a staff of 50 and I pay airtable $500 per month on the plus tier, each person can only generate 100 records before I have to upgrade. Even if I pay them $1000 per month on the pro tier I'm still worse off on this metric at 1000 records per person.
If your base has 5,001 records, only users with a $20/month plan can edit that base.
Everyone in your company to my understanding has to have the same plan though. So, you can't have one staff member at a $10/month plan, and another at $20/month plan.
And conversely, I have an unmarketed plan with <well known IaaS provider> despite being a tiny customer with no leverage - the point being that the packages marketed aren’t always the complete range available. But you have to ask.
SaaS had to be priced somehow, then someday someone came up with the idea of charging per-user and everybody followed that up, but it is not smart. Most SMB end up sharing accounts, which makes your product look worse than it actually is and at the same time makes your users miserable.
With regards to the SMB scenario I agree - and probably it would make sense for many services to have a base bundle tier with 5 or so accounts. And then price it based on some minimum value created. But also hard to do this if your competition is offering 1 user for $2.99.
I agree, it's not right for a lot of products (some of which are better charged at a flat fee, or a per "thing" basis), but it's not a stupid decision for a lot of businesses.
That said, the costs of SMBs getting away with one login do not outweigh the benefits of getting to charge enterprises per user. Most of these tools with free tiers and per-user pricing (Slack, Airtable) make most of their money from enterprise, not SMB.
Therefore I don't agree with you that it's "stupid" or "not smart".
We're not abusing Excel anymore, but we've ended up specialized software for everything. Ironically we've lost ability to create something that is exactly tailored for each person's need.
It seems only slightly more useful than say a Google spreadsheet on a platform that yes might have blocks and templates but I didn't see anything there that made me want to switch away from Google Spreadsheets, Trello and a couple of other systems I use to run my 20 person £1mm turnover business.
I'll keep it in mind but having played with Airtable I just don't see the value. Still, wish them all the best.
> Over the next two weeks we visited dozens of Excel customers, and did not see anyone using Excel to actually perform what you would call “calculations.” Almost all of them were using Excel because it was a convenient way to create a table.
> What was I talking about? Oh yeah… most people just used Excel to make lists. Suddenly we understood why Lotus Improv, which was this fancy futuristic spreadsheet that was going to make Excel obsolete, had failed completely: because it was great at calculations, but terrible at creating tables, and everyone was using Excel for tables, not calculations.
If you view it from the lens that most Excel users employ the spreadsheet to create lists and tables (data organization), then Airtable is one way to improve that workflow.
"Oh hey, I just need to fire off some data rapidly in an organized way. Boop, done." And that's the trick, isn't it? The need to rapidly organize previously un-organized data. It's not a case of, "I know exactly how I want to rapidly organize some data."
With Airtable, it would be "I now have to navigate this decoupled spread out GUI and learn what all these abstract terms mean, when all I want to do is calculate how much we spent on ice cream last month."
In essence, it is making the workflow slower for those types of people.
On the other end of the spectrum, from a programmer's point of view, GUI's ALWAYS slow things down. This is why programmers who used VIM / Emacs were faster than those using modern IDE's. It's why hot-keys are important to both technical and non-technical workers. Presentation does not equal productivity. The presentation is what Airtable is pushing as the abstraction for non-technical users.
If the target audience for Airtable is instead small-business startups - then those startups are going to be in for a world of hurt when they need to get into real business development. They will have wasted time, energy, and resources to get set up on a lego platform that they'll need to migrate away from.
Looking at the pricing model and data limitations, there's nothing that would make this a better choice than just hooking up to AWS or something similar, directly. Using Airtable would require maintaining some form of middleware for SPA's...and there's no way in the world that you wouldn't be hitting their caps rapidly. Just an extra cost.
I'm not saying this product won't work well for a market niche, but that niche is a lot smaller than the buzz words thrown around in today's publications.
Personally I am working on an Airtable/excel like product but rather than a spreadsheet, you can easily make structured hierarchies. Think rows, which could have more rows, or link to other cells. A very easy way to capture relational data.
You can just start writing stuff in cells Define headings and data types later. Like git, it stores version history, let’s you work offline and let’s you sync with others. Let’s you upload markdown, or pictures and files into cells. Define a stricter schemas later. Restrict editing/viewing of cells based on formulas so others can’t easily break what you’ve created.
I wrote a little manifesto at orows.com and working on a prototype. Once I have about a 100 users, I plan to quit my job and work on it full time.
Think github, but rather than files, an object graph.
You could buy foxpro for $1200 and create 100 databases with all sorts of janky workflows used within your small business. Paying $20/user/infinity for lower amounts of records doesn’t quite fit that niche. And so the hacked processes with Google Docs and now Excel365 continue.
Hopefully with this new funding, Airtable can fix their pricing model and become successful as Access was.
But I’m pretty weird. I suspect one that has really simple and easily measureable prices. Like $500/year for a terabyte of storage in as many bases as you want. This should let most small businesses not worry about cost. Kind of like how FoxPro let people build so many solutions.
The model now is not very predictable so it’s hard for small businesses to use.
I think 365 charges $100/user/year for 1TB. That’s for write/edit permissions. Maybe double that or something. So 5 users would give 5TB total for $1000/year.
Raw storage may not be the right measure, but it is better than cells since it is easier to report on. Just constantly showing raw or logical space.
Imagine if gmail charges by number of email messages in inbox and number of recipients rather than storage. That would be hard to predict.
It's an app that sits somewhere between a database and a spreadsheet, bringing the best features of both, that is easily "programmed" by non-programmers, and with a nice looking interface to boot.
I suspect HN behaves a little like how many folks treat their national army... you can't ask a question that may imply a bad decision during an important human/national event.
÷ "Why wasn't your system able to scale to 60 users during natural calamity?"
~ "How dare you question such a noble cause? Have you ever even worked with govt?" (Downvote)
÷ "Yes I have, we had systems in place that worked you know. Most states do."
~ (oh fuck, she knows what she's talking about) "States and municipals don't cooperate, so fuck off now"
So maybe, instead of attacking the OP, try answering the question directly, more honestly?
Make your points with logic and class people, not assholery.
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Like between Excel and a relational db app? Not sure about that.
Some things that often fail in excel is:
* You cant easily verify what the user writes.
* It is hard to stop users from destroying the formulas that make it work.
* It becomes slow when the row count starts to go up.
* You cant have user roles where some users is suppose to be able to see one thing and edit another and another user is to edit another thing and see something else.
* Data relationships are also mostly not there.
Sharepoint somewhat handles that with file locking and had some revision history and permissions support. Most people just put spreadsheets on shared folders, so of course they get blown up.
Airtable is basically an enterprise swiss army knife for solving trench-fighting issues. That's basically the market, freeing up developers to handle main projects to make it worth the company's time to employ them.
Some rando department needs a form for their new employees or needs to spreadsheet-collaborate? Instead of building some custom webapp, Airtable is a central point for those kinds of things where a more specialized workflow solution doesn't exist.
I hope they don't sell and keep building the mission
Sounds easy, don't you think?
P.s. Along the funding they announced a new feature, and the blog post that goes with it has an embedded map that breaks responsiveness on mobile...did no one really double check before announcing a major feature release?
The feature I miss most is charts/graphs. Really hope they'll add them one day.
https://airtable.com/blocks
But only for customers in the Pro tier.
What it really is is a darn-fine visual database that only looks like a spreadsheet (potentially...there are other views as well). The ability to create fairly sophisticated, structured data models along with an easy to way to collaboratively edit that data is pretty impressive. I've been using it both in my freelance business as well as to manage lots of household planning stuff along with my wife, and it's done a great job. I wish the Pro plan were cheaper...I'm only on Plus right now and want the features of the Pro plan. But I understand the need to charge for good tooling. (Also a happy paying customer of Basecamp here.)