Where does Airtable fit in the technology landscape?

Airtable is best described as a friendly database. There is no other tool quite like it, which can make it hard to get your head around what sort of thing it is and where it might fit into your company’s tooling (tooling architecture is the first thing I usually address with new clients in my coaching).

In this piece we’ll walk one by one through all of the adjacent categories of tools to Airtable, with the aim of helping you triangulate around what Airtable is and what it is not.

Contents

• Airtable vs Notion
• Airtable vs “Productivity Tools” (Click-up, Monday.com, Asana)
• Airtable vs Excel / Google Sheets
• Airtable vs NocoDB and Baserow
• Airtable vs Zapier/Make.com/n8n
• Airtable vs Softr/Noloco/Glide/Zite
• Airtable vs a “proper” database
• Airtable vs Vibe-coding Tools (Lovable, Replit, Bolt)
• Airtable vs “AI platforms”
• Airtable vs Low-code tools (e.g. Retool)
• Summary

Airtable vs Notion

They’re not really the same sort of thing at all. They often get lumped together (I think) because:

a) they emerged from silicon valley as leaders of new wave of 21st century office software at the same time, and

b) because there is some overlap: Notion will let you set up a rudimentary database and some automations; you can interact with it via API and integrate other tools into it.

But the similarities are much more style than substance. As tools they start from completely different places; to greatly over simplify: Notion is for words, Airtable is for numbers. Notion is based around documents, Airtable is based around rows and tables.

If you already work in and know Notion there is no harm in starting using it to build out the first version of a database you might have in mind. But if your database / app has any level of complexity to it, pretty soon you will find yourself hankering for a tool that is designed from the outset as a database, which is Airtable.

Airtable vs “Productivity Tools” (Click-up, Monday.com, Asana)

No they’re not the same, not really. You can choose to build out your Airtable as a project management / task management tool if you want (and Airtable have made it much easier to do this recently) but you could equally well make your Airtable into a CRM, a stock tracker for your plant nursery, a customer portal, a marketing calendar…

The point is that Airtable can basically be made into anything - with some important limitations. It is general purpose. These productivity tools are designed around one use-case of task/project management, and they do that extremely well. But they don’t do anything else really.

In fact one of the reasons Airtable’s marketing is so bad is precisely this point that what Airtable is for is so unspecified - because it is a general purpose tool. It’s kind of like marketing Excel in the 1980s: “But what should I use it for?”, “Whatever you want!”.

So if you’re wondering whether it is crazy to use both Click-up/monday.com/Asana and Airtable in your business - no, I proposed exactly this architecture to a client in 2022. Airtable is a database; productivity tools are not databases.

Airtable vs Excel / Google Sheets

This is a big topic. In a sense, yes - obviously they are very similar. They look and feel the same; you use them for storing data. You do data-ry things with them. They have a table structure. You can (now) use google sheets to do quite a lot of automation stuff and even to act as a back-end for basic applications (e.g. see Glide).

But they’re also in an important sense not the same at all. Airtable will force you to reveal the structure and form of your data - how it connects together, what type of data each column is. It is deliberately structured and formal because once the system understands how your data works you have a solid foundation to start building the real stuff on: automations, integrations, alerts, interfaces, etc. Airtable gives you proper data foundations. Excel is kind of better thought of as a canvas for numbers.

Airtable is usually a maturation path beyond spreadsheets, i.e. when the spreadsheet starts getting out of hand, or you start asking things of it which Sheets/Excel obviously aren’t designed for, like - can we control who can see or edit which pieces of data? Is the data backed-up? Can we ‘link’ our Customers data to our Orders data? Can we integrate this to Gmail/Slack/Salesforce/whatever?

Excel - it’s worth saying - does have its own strengths over Airtable to this day. If I am doing any kind of ad hoc data analysis, or something very quick, or perhaps some dashboarding or numerical calculations I’ll always go to Excel. Excel is great for calculations.

Airtable vs NocoDB and Baserow

You might not recognise these tools but these are Airtable’s closest direct competitors. Both are open-source copies (effectively) of Airtable. Like many open-source projects they are 2-3 years behind in terms of functionality but have the huge advantage that if you know what you’re doing you can take them and deploy them to your own cloud infrastructure for free (aside from cloud server costs) - and maintain complete control of all the data going into them.

You can also use their cloud / paid versions, which are easy to use and similar to Airtable but roughly 50% cheaper. Baserow also run their servers out of Amsterdam, so if you care about your data being stored in the EU this is far, far cheaper than going onto Airtable Enterprise to unlock the EU cloud option.

For my part, the whole time I’ve worked in the No-Code space I’ve looked longingly at these tools, waiting for a project I can try them out on. And I’ve never (yet) found one. Airtable just comes with too many advantages - interfaces, AI fields, sync tables, in-built automation suite - and it does this at a price point which is higher, but competitive. But this doesn’t mean they won’t be right for your project; if you’re exploring Airtable it is worth a look at these two.

Airtable vs Zapier/Make.com/n8n

They’re not the same thing. However it is true that Airtable includes an automation suite, which itself can be directly compared to Zapier/Make.com/n8n. So one part of the Airtable toolkit can be compared, but not the overall platform itself.

Zapier/Make.com/n8n are much, much more powerful than Airtable automations (because they live or die on this offer as standalone platforms. They have a far wider range of integrations, many, many more functions within each.

Airtable’s Gmail options

Make.com’s Gmail options

Zapier’s Gmail options

They are also agnostic about which system(s) they are connected with. You can think of them as general glue that stitches together any system or tool in your company - Salesforce to Google Sheets to Email to Slack to Dropbox. Airtable automations, on the other hand, are mostly designed to transform data within Airtable (you can also to a limited degree pull / push data in / out of Airtable).

These two categories are often complements - I’ve worked on many projects where we used both Airtable AND one of these tools: Airtable automations for the simpler stuff, Zapier/Make.com/n8n for heavy lifting and moving data between systems.

Airtable vs Softr/Noloco/Glide/Zite

These tools are very much complements to Airtable (i.e. you would use them with Airtable). Airtable is the back-end, and these are the front-end. You use them because you want to build a front-end experience which goes beyond what Airtable Interfaces can support. For example: client portals, richer charting/graphing, more design and visual customisation, more layout options, more flexibility etc.

The other reason you use them is cost savings when you have lots of users. Airtable price on users who have edit access to data. One project I worked on required field engineers to log in once or twice per month to update some numbers. Minimal usage, but since they’re editing data, that’s $24 per engineer, per month. With 200 engineers, they were looking at a bill of nearly $5,000 per month. A tool like Noloco by contrast would be about $1,300 in that situation. Zite might be much less still.

It’s true that some of these tools (Zite, Noloco) have their own basic automations suites, and have recently made forays into offering their own integrated database. This is the beginnings of them becoming direct competitors to Airtable by trying to offer an entire platform. But they are still some years behind Airtable on this front and I personally don’t tend see them as competitors (at least not yet).

Airtable vs a “proper” database

A “proper” database is what a software engineer means when he/she says ‘database’. Basically this is a SQL database (e.g. MySQL, Postgres) which is running in some cloud somewhere and which you control.

Airtable is very, very much like a ‘proper’ database - that is where the inspiration for Airtable comes from. Airtable is designed to be as much as possible like a SQL database whilst also being friendly and accessible to non-technical people. This means it has a completely different look and feel to databases, while having a similar underlying technical logic (albeit with some pretty important differences). Note - Airtable is not a SQL database, it is heavily inspired by SQL databases but it is it’s own class of thing.

SQL Workbench

Airtable UI

Supabase UI

To briefly summarise a few things a SQL database gets you over Airtable:

• Scalability / Performance - Airtable will cap out at 500k rows in a base (and performance will degrade well before that). SQL databases can scale to essentially limitless size provided they are configured properly
• Interoperability - SQL databases are the back-end to pretty much every piece of software you’ve ever used, therefore the ecosystem of tools around SQL databases is vast and very mature. Think of Data/BI tools, mapping tools, finance tools, pretty much any ancillary piece of software designed to pull in data. Airtable however is pretty hit or miss, sometimes you’ll get an integration, many times not.
• AI/Embeddings - Airtable claim they are an “AI Native” platform, but until they incorporate embeddings as a field type I’m not buying it. Embeddings are like the language that LLMs think in. Postgres will let you store and query embeddings directly, which means you can build genuine, ground-up AI applications on top of it. Airtable has not, and shows no signs of, going down this route.

If you want to feel what a ‘proper’ database feels like, the easiest place to start is with Supabase. This a Postgres (i.e. SQL) database which has learnt from Airtable’s innovations on making databases simple and user friendly. It is still a step or two up from Airtable but it is the most accessible way to start toying around with a ‘proper’ database.

Airtable vs Vibe-coding Tools (Lovable, Replit, Bolt)

Interesting one. Airtable does now claim to be part of the vibe-coding revolution, but it’s not really. It is an existing database-oriented platform which has had a bit of vibe-coding painted on top. The breakout vibe-coding tools were built from the ground up as a completely new category of tool.

If you can think of something you want to build in Airtable, could you build it in Lovable instead? Obviously I can’t speak to the specifics of your case, but the answer is “probably”. Should you build it in Lovable, as in - is that a good idea? The answer to this is more likely to be “no”, but it really depends what you’re building.

What is unproven in my mind with vibe-coding tools is not the initial prototyping stage, which is beyond magical, but what happens when you actually have a real production app to run and support. If your company depends on this system, are you happy to surrender your control, ownership and management of that system to an AI? What happens when something breaks which the AI can’t fix?

The big difference is probably that if your lovable/bolt/replit app is useful and takes root inside your company, at some point you will likely need to shift it over to some developers to re-write and manage; that comes with resourcing implications. Airtable, if you learn and build yourself, you can keep under your own care and management indefinitely.

Airtable vs “AI platforms”

I don’t think anyone actually knows what an AI Platform is any more. Every piece of software has rebranded as “AI Native”, including Airtable itself.

What comes to mind for me when I think of an AI Platform is Stack-AI. This is a tool for building AI applications, i.e. workflows, apps, and so on which centre around AI-specific functionality and would make no sense in a world without AI. So your workflow will receive a customer complaint via email, use and LLM + RAG to look up the relevant policy docs and then AI-draft a response. That just doesn’t make any sense in a world without AI.

Genuinely AI-native tools, like Stack-AI, have architected their product entirely around how AI works, whereas Airtable has bolted in on afterwards. The AI features in Airtable are getting more useful every day but it has to keep it’s essential form factor (i.e. a hand-configured database) and as such there will be entire universes of AI capabilities which Airtable will never really be able to offer.

Airtable vs Low-code tools (e.g. Retool)

The basic difference is that low-code tools are closer to full-on coding. You have to have basic knowledge of some core technical concepts in Retool before you make much progress in it (e.g. how front and back-end interact).

In Airtable, even though you can build systems of quite remarkable complexity, you can still get started as a non-technical person and you’ll be able to make meaningful progress on your own. Airtable has a much shallower ‘shallow end’ than low-code tools.

Retool’s advantage is that it offers a much higher degree of customisation and tailoring, and a substantially more powerful set of capabilities for building systems of greater complexity or sophistication.

Summary

Airtable, then, is a friendly database which sits some way between Sheets/Excel and SQL databases. When things are going well, you get the best of both: intuitive user interface and features which allow non-technical people to make progress, whilst also being powerful enough to build fully-fledged, scalable and durable systems.

One of Airtable’s great advantages is that you can get started with it as an ‘all in one’ platform, meaning as well as a database it gives you the tools to also start doing something with that data: automations, interfaces, scripts, forms, etc. Having this all under one roof keeps everything simple and approachable, and saves you shunting data around.

None of the following tools can compete on that ‘all in one’ capability: Sheets, Supabase/SQL database, n8n, Zapier, Make.com, Noloco, Zite, Fillout.com, Glide, Baserow, NocoDB; nor can Notion, Click-up, Asana etc either, which as we know are not really tools for building in.

And yet, if you hit the limitations on Airtable you can usually extend it out with point-solution tools for Interfaces, Forms and Automations. The hard limits you can’t get around are to do with Data: the number of rows you’ll need, the general complexity of the data model, etc.

So the only category discussed which does offer this all in one capability are the vibe-coding tools (e.g. Lovable, Replit). Choosing between Airtable and these tools really depends on a number of factors quite beyond the scope of this article. But note the best way to experience this as a hybrid is by sticking Zite on top of your Airtable; that’ll give you an Airtable back-end which you control with a vibe-coded front-end using the latest of AI.