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
Replicon Polaris PSA
Score 7.3 out of 10
N/A
Replicon Polaris PSA is a professional services automation platform containing project management, expense tracking, and billing features, from Replicon headquartered in Redwood City, California.
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.
It is perfect for inputing time sheets, time offs and expenses. It is hosted on the cloud, so accessible from anywhere, and even from mobile. It should nonetheless do just that, as it is not suited to track the work that you are doing or details about it. It is completely useless in that case.
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.
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.
Though the technical support staff are always very nice, sometimes they don't seem to understand exactly what the issue is based on our explanation. There have been several times when I've ended up solving the issue on my own without their assistance, despite numerous emails and phone calls. Could be a language barrier issue, perhaps they could receive more training in how companies are actually using the software on a daily basis.
Employee time sheets have to be approved by project managers and supervisors prior to my final approval. However, when viewing the time sheets in list form, there is no way for me to tell whether a time sheet has been approved by everyone else. I have to manually open each one and hover over the approver link. It would be helpful if there was a column in the list showing which approvers still need to approve it.
There have been a few times when time sheets were accidentally deleted by approvers. In order to retrieve them, we've had to contact Replicon support and have a backup instance of the information created. It would be great if perhaps there was some sort of archive or recently deleted section that could be accessed right away without having to go through Replicon support, a folder or something that would hold on to recently deleted files for a few days or a week just in case they needed to be retrieved.
Some of our projects have more than one project manager. Replicon currently allows for co-managers to be assigned to a project, but this status does not seem to include that co-manager in the approval of time sheets and expenses. We have had to manually create an approval path to include that second manager. It would be nice if co-managers would automatically be included in those approval paths.
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.
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
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.
We used to track time on JIRA on the tickets. This was good enough for time tracking, but didn't integrate efficiently with accounting software, so accountants had to replicate manually the data from JIRA to their software in order to bill clients. Using Replicon made things much easier for them.
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
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.
