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.
$24
per month per seat
Glip (discontinued)
Score 9.7 out of 10
N/A
Glip was a conversation platform to plan, share and organize work. Glip featured text and video chat at its core, with file sharing, collaborative task management, shared calendars, and automatic version control. Glip was acquired by RingCentral in 2015 and is no longer available standalone, though its features are included in RingCentral MVP.
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.
Glip should definitely be on your shortlist for a team collaboration tool. Glip has a lower cost and contains all the features found in competitive tools such as Microsoft Teams and Webex Teams. Glip is also scalable and robust enough for large enterprises and is great to coordinate and document large projects with hundreds of tasks and hundreds of resources. Glip, MS, and Webex Teams are excellent for an individual to create and receive task assignments and document and complete those tasks but these tools do not replace enterprise project management software and tools. Glip, MS Teams, and Webex Teams quickly become complicated and disorganized and it becomes easy to drown in all the sea of data unless you work diligently and continually at organizing your workspace.
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.
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.
Glip has saved us so much time that my team could no longer live without it. I don't know what we would do. All of us used it constantly all day every day. It is one of the best tools in my arsenal!
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.
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
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
We have a free account so I understand why we are not at the top of the list. But we have had issues before that took forever for them to get back to us. Once I had to make a Twitter account just to tweet at them about the issue and they finally got back to me. After several weeks. And the issue was something we just had to wait out for a few more days. Normally you have to submit a ticket through their support page and maybe they will get back to you and maybe not. We had one issue where the standard user on the iMac was getting popups every few minutes about installing a helper tool. The only way to fix this was to delete and reinstall Glip as an admin user. This was frustrating because it took time to do this for me as the IT person, and after reaching out to a few times, I was finally given an answer two years after I had asked about it! Finally some devs reach out to me on Glip and told me to just put the app in the user folder instead of the app folder which is managed by the admin account. They said it should be fixed now and I believe it is.
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 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.
Zoom, Slack, and Wunderlist are all great applications. They do a good job at one core focus. If your team is already familiar with these applications and satisfied with them, you can stick with them. I found Slack confusing and difficult to learn, as did others when onboarding. Zoom and Wunderlist both have a solid user interface and do their jobs well -- not many complaints from them. I just valued simplicity and ease of adoption, which made us look at Glip as one app to do it all.
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
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.
Because Glip was free, it helped us save money on our chat app. While not a crucial part of the business, the costs of software for your company add up and it was nice that, in this case, it did not add to our expenses.
This isn't really Glip directly, but we used it because we were using RingCentral Meetings for video conferencing with clients, and unfortunately RingCentral Meetings was a bit difficult to use. This was often the client doing things wrong, but it was annoying to have frequent audio feedback, etc. So if that is part of your reason to use Glip, check out if you have any problems there first.
