This is a kind of condensed version of conversations I often have with clients or prospective clients…..
Who you are
A solopreneur, company owner of a small business, manager in an small-medium size business. Not technical and little to no experience of software engineering - although perhaps quite capable at Excel, process mapping, project management or other analytical tasks. You are probably curious about tech - maybe playing around with AI - and specifically interested in exploring how your company could better leverage data, automate processes, and generally start to systematise it’s operations.
What Airtable is
At heart it is a friendly database designed for non-technical users. Structuring your data properly then unlocks lots of good stuff like automations, integrations to other systems, front-end interfaces, and so on; as such Airtable becomes a kind of general-purpose platform for developing internal systems.
There are important limitations (see below) and the presentation preferred by Airtable’s marketing department of late (’AI App development platform!’) is unhelpful and somewhat misleading, but generally speaking Airtable strikes an outstanding balance between being approachable to non-technical people whilst also being powerful enough to run most of the operations of a small company from.
But what actually is it?
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If this is helpful I would strongly encourage you to just set up a free account here and play around. LINK HERE
How is it different than Excel?
Deep breath. Ok. Excel is not a database. Excel is a kind of canvas for numbers. You can make Excel behave some of the way towards the way a database behaves, but you are having to manually impose the rules on top of it to make it do this. Even there there are lots of database-y things it will never do.
A database will store your data like your business depends on it. This means you can control who has permission rights to edit or add data, you have back-ups, you can decide who can see which bits of the data when and in what way, you can scale it to hold vast quantities of data without losing (much) performance. In a database you store the data as an explicit model which resembles your real-world business. So Customers are connected to Orders at a fundamental level, meaning when you look up customer ‘Tom Halloran’ you find all orders associated with him automatically. Having data properly structured like this also makes it easy to build automated processes around the data (e.g. when a new customer order comes in, send them an order confirmation email).
Airtable is not all the way to a database but it is most of the way. You get most of those database benefits described above while having an interface which looks mostly like Excel. That is a huge win. Note however that there are some things Excel is better for (see below)
What alternatives do I have to Airtable?
Three way diagram (more technical i.e. low code, nocode; Excel, SAAS)
My software engineers are telling me we should use a “proper” database / SQL database
They might be right. It all depends on what application you are looking to build. But do note that software engineers will almost always incline more towards “proper” database because they are technically superior in almost every way. You have to factor in a trade-off that they will not make, which is: who will support and maintain this system/database over the long-run? Am I ok being reliant on software engineers to make any change however slight?
There are plenty of valid technical reasons why Airtable would not be up to the job, or not be the optimal choice, for some kind of system which you might have in mind. Many of those are listed here but the specifics will always vary on a case by case basis.
What you are entitled to do is ask your developers for a proper evaluation of why Airtable is not appropriate for this particular project, and have them explain that to you in English. This may involve a bit of prototyping and exploration, if they are not already familiar with Airtable. The outcome might be close-cut or it might be a complete non-starter.
See xx on the differences between a ‘proper’ database and Airtable
Is Airtable an automation platform?
Yes and no. Airtable does include as one of it’s foundational pillars an automation suite (called ‘Automations’) however this is designed to be used generally only within Airtable; this differs from general-purpose automation platforms such as Zapier, Make.com, n8n, etc, which are designed more to act like ‘webbing’ or ‘glue’ between multiple systems already in use by the business. Airtable generally want you to be developing all parts of your system in Airtable, and so the automations are mostly oriented inwardly (although note you do have some functionality to interact with Gmail, Docs, Slack, etc)
If by ‘automation’ you mean something more general, like roughly synonymous with just ‘tech’ or ‘software’ then yes you can think of it as a kind of automation platform, since it combines many of the core ingredients people associate with software: database, front-end interfaces and custom logic.
See xxx on automations.
What is Airtable not good at?
Let’s start by ruling out areas that Airtable does not perform well in
Systems which need to store large volumes of data
I had a client in London who had 14bn rows of data, about pupils across the UK
Advanced Analytics
Mobile apps of any sort
High-performance systems
External (esp. customer-facing) systems
Building AI Apps
‘High design’ style apps / front-end experiences
Think of the apple website…
Also graphs which are interactive
It is designed to help companies manage their data and operations, it is pretty limited in terms of aesthetics. You can barely even do custom brand colours
Building a website
Ok, what sorts of things can you build with Airtable?
Take a look at the gallery to get some ideas.
It is actually quite hard to get a sense since systems are so often internal and therefore private. The gallery does not show you interfaces, which are integral
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Some examples from my clients:
- Marcus / Tutoring biz
- Christoph / Marketing operations
- Veritran / Resourcing
Will Airtable help me ‘do’ AI?
You shouldn’t be trying to ‘do’ AI. You should be figuring out what changes will help your business move better/faster/harder/stronger and working back from that to the technology.
Who are Airtable’s immediate competitors? (e.g. nocodb, baserow)
Who are Airtable’s broader competitors? (e.g. Low code vs nocode, custom software dev, excel)
Can I use Airtable to build a client portal?
Yes, although Noloco is probably better
In what ways is Airtable different than a “proper” database?
By “proper” we probably mean a SQL database.
Should I use Airtable as my CRM?
Difficult one.
Can I bring data from anywhere across my company into Airtable? What if the integration is not listed?
What use-cases would Airtable be technically able to support, but it still be unadvisable?
- Lots, and lots of users who all need to edit data → expensive
- Highly analytical things that excel would be better for
- A software category that is common across all businesses e.g. HR, CRM, Accounting, etc
So, is Airtable for me?
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Do I need to hire a developer to build in Airtable for me? Can I do it myself? What kind of liability am I taking on for myself in terms of technical capability in the company/myself?
How long will it take me to build X in Airtable?
No idea. It depends what X is, and how skilled you are in Airtable
Pricing and costs - how should I estimate the costs of using Airtable?
Consideration structure:
- Understanding what Airtable is and what it is not
- Costs
- Security, data access, permissions, EU data storage, is my data safe?
- “Strategic” - technical capacity in the business, lock-in, moving to custom code later, not re-inventing the wheel with well-trodden software categories e.g. accounting, AI - is Airtable an answer to us wanting to do AI?
- People and skills? How hard is it to learn? Will I need a developer
- Capabilities and limitations