What Is Airtable? What Can You Do With It?
Airtable is an online system where a group of collaborators can store, share, and collaboratively edit information. The information might be ideas, inventory, tasks, or something else. This all may sound vague, but it’s hard to describe the app without giving examples or making comparisons, so let’s do that.
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 rather elaborate, like a financial accounting system that links to other sheets and so forth.
Airtable Review
By Fergus O’Sullivan (Writer, FormAirtable is a piece of project management software that promises to be the “one source of truth” for your company. Epistemological concerns aside, we really got to like the program in the course of writing up this Airtable review, and we feel it could belong in our ranking of the best project management software.Key Takeaways:
- Airtable’s free plan is simply great. It offers all kinds of functionality for the price of zero.
- Upgrading is less great, as all it does is increase some usage caps without adding features. At $10 per user per month for the Plus plan, we feel it’s a bit steep.
- Airtable is one of the more user-friendly services we’ve used so far: the user interface is laid out well and the tutorials are clear and to the point.
Unfortunately, though, Airtable won’t crack the top five of the best project management software because there are some issues with pricing and we also feel its features could be a bit more extensive.
That shouldn’t keep you from giving it a spin, though: Airtable offers a free 14-day trial as well as an excellent free plan. You can always switch to our favorite project management service — monday.com — if it doesn’t work out (read our monday.com review to find out why we like it so much).
How Much Does Airtable Cost?
Airtable has four plan types: Free, Pro, Plus, and Enterprise. The company offers discounts on these plans for organizations in nonprofit work and education.
How Do Airtable’s Prices Compare?
Compared with other collaboration apps, Airtable’s prices are reasonably competitive, though it’s difficult to compare Airtable directly to any other app. Smartsheet (starting at $19 per person per month), for example, has a spreadsheet-like approach similar to Airtable, but you can also use it as a full-fledged project management app, as well. Airtable isn’t designed for that.
Another app that shares some similarities but is not, strictly speaking, a database management tool is Monday.com. It costs roughly $10 to $20 per person per month, but with Monday.com, you have to pay for licenses in preset batches, so for example, if you have a team of 17 people, you have to round up and pay for 20.
Quick Base, another online database system, no longer makes its prices public, but formerly it charged fees similar to Airtable’s. Quick Base requires a minimum number of licenses per account.
Pros
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“This software is so great for collaborating with non-google users. The features are smart and help do some of the work for us.”
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“Airtable is a godsend for collaboration between our Sales and Marketing teams and for easy visibility (enterprise-wide) into the various plans, calendars, and so on for those teams.”
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“I love it, and it was a big accomplishment for me to be able to organize all of the employees’ activities. The desire to reduce workflow to a more user-friendly level must be reined in.”
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“Airtable is brilliant for all project management needs it’s useful because you can create basis for all of your work and then follow things through to completion.”
Cons
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“The UI is still slightly complicated, and I had a lot of trouble finding documentation on linked fields.”
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“It’s usability is inhibited by the lack of design features. There is no way to upload your own icon for the bases.”
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“Horrid frustrating disapointed in most everything.”
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“The only problem I have with this software is the terrible iOS applications. If I want to use it on my iPad I do no use the app but rather the web browser due to the lack of functionality.”