7shifts vs. Airtable

7Shifts is ideal for a broad number of restaurant clients, whether it is a single unit, independent location or multi-unit, multi-jurisdiction group like ours. Pricing is very reasonable, and as mentioned earlier, a lightweight and intuitive platform makes it easy to implement and maintain, and scalable for growth

Incentivized

Airtable is an ideal platform for small and growing businesses to keep track of just about EVERYTHING they need to keep things running smoothly. It's a great way to keep tasks organized, and keep everyone on the same page with progress on all things. Our company finds the kanban particularly useful, as products go through a lifecycle from ideation to retirement, it's good to keep a database of what is in production, what's working, and what we've tried before. I can see the platform being challenging with much larger businesses, but for the small to medium businesses I've used the platform with, it is ideal.

Incentivized

• Staff can easily access fellow team members' contact info (phone & email).
• Staff can easily enter availability or time off.
• Managers have a log book to share issues or updates from the days’ shift so quick action can be completed easily if needed.
• Being able to communicate with managers only, with a specific department, or with the entire staff easily is very helpful.

Incentivized

• I can create tables, create and customize fields
• Airtable has capabilities commonly found in spreadsheet applications, but also has some of the features found in databases.
• The ability to filter fields. I set up a filter on the status field, so when a project is marked, complete, on hold, or canceled, that record is hidden from my current projects table view. If it is marked complete, the record is moved to the completed projects table view. In this way I can easily access a record of past projects
• Being able to duplicate tables and create alternate views
• Collapse and expand records. When I collapse the rows, I can easily scan current projects, next steps, project status, and due dates. When I expand the row, or field, I can see more detailed information about that field or record very easily. I can also expand or open the entire record. This is is helpful, when I am entering a lot of information to multiple fields in that record.

Incentivized

• When creating schedules I wish there was a way to remember the last schedule you were on instead of ordering them in alphabetical order.
• When working on a schedule, again when you revisit it, it alphabetizes the employees instead of keeping them in the order you add them. This is pertinent for our business because we're reservation-based and work off of a rotating schedule where the lowest ones are called off if there are not enough reservations.

Incentivized

• When records are deleted, there could be more options for what happens to associated records in other tables.
• Multi-select fields should be sortable.
• The per-user pricing model can be cumbersome when you need to share bases with third parties but can't use a publicly accessible URL.

Incentivized

We will 10/10 renew the use of Airtable because it has brought great value to our team. Not only is Airtable affordable, but it's also user-friendly and helps our team be efficient. We no longer need to rely on Excel spreadsheets being passed from person to person via email. Furthermore, we aren't dealing with corrupt Excel spreadsheets and the need to salvage data when a file is accidentally altered.

IMO the usability of this product is its greatest asset. The UI is clean and the menus are intuitive to the point where I'd feel confident having a non-spreadsheety colleague take on building an Airtable for the first time with next to no training. I can't say that about every table-like software product that I've used such as Notion.

Incentivized

I have rarely experience downtime, compared to other tools, and given how much time we spend on the tool. Even if there were to be, their updates on it are very timely, and our support team are able to provide any questions regarding

Incentivized

I never had any issues with load time, even with the integrations that we use today (google sheets) However, I'm curious if adding additional layers of integrations would slow down performance. We do carry quite a bit of data in Airtable, but, again, no impact on overall performance

Incentivized

I would say everyone at our store really appreciates the fact that we have 7shifts. We would be lost with out it. It would be hard to find anyone that does not support the software.

Incentivized

Airtable has great support. They have a variety of support features to answer any questions. They have great self teaching instructions for templates and product tours. They also have support for teams and project management. They also have a fantastic customer help line. They are able and willing to answer customer questions and never have customers waiting long

Incentivized

This training was done in-house, but the Airtable team provided resources and how to guides to ensure that we covered all components of the system

Incentivized

Recorded trainings were provided by the Airtable team. Great as an evergreen resources to new team members and for anyone that wants to refresh their Airtable knowledge

Incentivized

Training all users was an important part of the implementation, which did take considerable time and effort. At first glance without training, the content calendar can be overwhelming because of the amount of data. The features within Airtable seem to be endless but our team was able to identify the most important to be successful.

For me, 7Shifts has the same amount of functionality, but for a much better price. The app functionality of 7shifts was easier to navigate and allowed me to do more than HotSchedules. I've recommended it to several other local businesses who have implemented it as well and had great luck.

Incentivized

Airtable was a really good fit for this specific use case as it provided a huge number of collaboration features in an intuitive and pleasant-to-use interface. The free tier worked initially with our work, and the upgrade pathway was fair and made sense for us.

Incentivized

I did not help purchase the product, but Airtable's per user pricing structure is inconvenient when some users only need occasional or read-only use.

Incentivized

There are TONS of opportunity to scale, but I think it's a matter if you have the time and resources to do so because the initial setup can be fairly time consuming and prioritized dedication

Incentivized

• Positive: Less call outs/ and missed communication due to internal conversations that were never communicated. For example, employees tell manager A they are not coming but Manager A does not tell manage B and C.
• Positive: Manager log book has helped multiple departments stay in touch and on the pulse of the floor operation. Departments like HR, events, reservations, AP/ AR, etc. are not empowered to be more proactive
• Labor and sales are tracked and can be forecasted which has helps us schedule SMARTER

Incentivized

• It gives us a real-time experience of working.
• Through this platform, I always have the idea bout which of my team member is working on which particular part of the project, I can easily track their progress, and also I can easily correct them where it is required by adding sticky notes, by sending the attachments and URLs.
• Quality services.

Incentivized