Airtable is a project management and collaboration platform designed to enable content pipelines, product management, events planning, user research, and more. It combines spreadsheet,database, calendar, and kanban functionality within one platform.
$10
per month
Bonita Platform
Score 8.3 out of 10
N/A
Bonita is an open-source business process and workflow management platform created by the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science. It is available as a free community edition or as a commercial subscription product.
Airtable is very well suited for a niche environment that finds other project tracking or collaborative tools to be limiting. The ability to build out a single pool of information to best suit each team member's visual or functional needs is amazing. While the setup time can be lengthy, depending on your particular needs, it is really worth it when it's finally ready.
Well suited for low code/no code applications centered around approval flows. It has built-in task management for users to see their pending actions, comments, statuses, etc. It has a very nice design for process flows. Less appropriate may be for generic type applications with complex screens and logic within those screens that need a lot of data to process.
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.
Bonita seems particularly suited for processes requiring a great deal of human interaction. Its user model allows you to control access to business processes in a fine-grained way. This allows for business processes to move smoothly between users and services as the process advances.
The definition and usage of custom forms from the latest version of Bonita seems particularly powerful. It allows for a thorough customization of the look-and-feel and does not require complex developments.
The web interface and administration section have greatly improved in the latest versions. Installation and configuration of processes has become more flexible and more structured. The administration section gives a good view on failed processes, allowing to analyse problems in an efficient way.
While working on the Airtable I have noticed that it is not open to uploading of the files for large sizes, most of the time files are not uploaded or links may get broken.
In addition, they do not talk much about the time tracking tool and how we can calculate our hours, I still do it with just estimation and by the calendar.
There is a learning curve beyond the boot camps that needs to be addressed with more structured curriculum.
The full stack technologies are industry standard, but these [are] challenging to learn and could use a learning path and orientation. There's probably opportunity for third-parties here to help with learning and adoption.
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.
Airtable has fantastic usability. I personally am fair when it comes to most technologies off the bat. I can understand a lot after being taught but most take me a little when I am teaching myself. Airtable was EXTREMELY easy to use off the bat. It was easy to understand or quickly figure out answers to my questions if i ever felt confused. Someone who has little technological experience could figure out Airtable quite easily.
Bonita Platform has allowed us to develop GUI relatively fast using its UI Designer while being able to seamlessly integrate our business logic in Java in a BPMN2 process diagram. It gives a nice productivity boost but still requires programming know-how to be able to deliver the final solution to your business problems.
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
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
Engine itself is efficient enough for most cases I dealt with. It can also be extended by clustering. I have done performance tests with JMeter and only managed to induce the crash of... JMeter. If there are efficiency issues they usually concern bad design/implementation of created apps or bottlenecks in integrated systems. Although I have met two cases with efficiency loss.
1. Java 7 related PermGen saturation caused by big number of installed apps (there is no jar dependency reusal between apps option).
2. Big number of waiting event handlers in processes stresses the database.
I haven't contacted customer support yet, so I wouldn't be able to give a fair response. We also use the free version of the app. They do have document files, which we have looked at to answer key questions. Because it looks like there are a lot of people that use airtable, we've been able to find a lot of resources online.
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
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.
Airtable exceeds all competitors I’ve seen. The feature set is full and only growing. The UI is intuitive for non-tech employees. Any competitors that match Airtable are really operating in a different space. Airtable is the industry leader in this category. Period.
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
Respect of BPMN standard over the long term. Good enhancements by Bonitasoft for new use cases, for example the introduction of a real form editor even if it has been technically difficult to manage. Once done though, we have far greater possibility of human interaction.
The performance of the platform has been key to generate revenue and compensate for the investment we made at the beginning.
Since the results were good, we proceeded to continue using the software, and in this way we obtained a large amount of profits, increasing our ROI to 5.
