Airtable vs. Dropbox

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

It has been great for my real estate business as I have many files and need to keep them for a minimum of 5 years. I use it for business and personal files to stay organized. I don't care to use it for photo storage as I feel that it takes up too much space, and I prefer to keep them separate.

• 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

• I can share projects I need feedback on.
• I can make projects available to editors so that they can do their work.
• Dropbox is a place where I can store files that I can access from anywhere, even if I don't have my laptop with me at the time.
• I have an old friend who is an acting professor in Tokyo. He loves the dialogue that I write in my novels. He converts chapters into scenework for his acting students. They get very excited when there's new material!

• 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

• I’d like to be able to hover over an image/document and have it expand/enlarge without actually opening it
• I’d love to see a carousel that lets me thumb through more quickly
• I’m almost always in thumbnail view. I’d like to see them re-organize automatically when something is moved or deleted instead of leaving an empty space.
• AI options for photo editing.
• Easier pdf markups

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.

Dropbox is a user-friendly, easy tool which requires little to no skill and they offer a free version with a good amount of storage available. There are other file sharing tools available however at a cost. Dropbox free version I have used for years and it serves every purpose I need.

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

It works extremely well, and we have never had any issues with connecting or sharing files. It's very easy to use, and any team member can share, add, and delete files to a virtual drive. This is extremely helpful, and it's an amazing tool to use, ensuring everyone can connect and work together effectively.

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

Dropbox is really useful, you can access any file from anywhere and you can upload and even edit files online, but, sometimes it can be slow. Downloading, uploading, and syncing is a bit slow, it can take several minutes. Furthermore, the search engine for large amounts of data can be slow too and it is not powerful.

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

They immediately responded like in an example that I gave where one of our staff members accidentally deleted the whole Special Hope Network Dropbox, we immediately contacted Dropbox they walked us through the steps of how to retrieve the information and luckily enough we were able to retrieve the entire Dropbox and we have had back and forth with Dropbox on what to do when an employee leaves how to remove them how to add another employee.

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

I did not personally take any training for Dropbox so I am self taught but I know when our Vice President selected Dropbox, he personally did do some training modules on it and I'm assuming it was very easy and simple to understand since he now acts like he is a pro at it!

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.

I needed to stay current in improving my daily operations. Dropbox
was suggested to me by a former colleague two-years ago and I've been using it just fine ever since.

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

For me, Dropbox is so much easier to use than Google Drive. I have both because I have a client who relies on me using Google, but each time I upload something, it gets lost in translation, and the document does not appear the same in Google. Frustrating. Love Dropbox!

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

bc i think box.com is better and more affordable

• 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

• When it works (usually if a client already has Dropbox, so they don't get the solicitation to sign up), it works flawlessly.
• I've had multiple clients not see the "continue with download only" at the bottom and email me to resend the media another way because they don't have a Dropbox account.