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
TeamDesk
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
TeamDesk is a low-code development platform for online database creation. Business owners or managers can build a unique web database solution without any programming to facilitate working with data, organize routine work and create an accessible data source for teams.
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.
Teamdesk is perfect for any operational tracking requirements for companies small or large, and any situation where you need to integrate with other systems since it can be set up to do that flexibly via its API and Webhooks. For example, you could track contacts, time and expense, projects and tasks, schedules, web leads, check-ins, order entry, quotes and invoices, support ticketing, and use the more advanced features to integrate with other systems to pull in currency exchange rates, various lists of data from other databases, send faxes, send bulk emails and so on. It does not do offline storage, so it would not be appropriate for a situation that offline work.
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.
Provide a very good, customizable user management system.
Gives a lot of flexibility to customize database to your needs without requiring coding skills. Even allows to customize interface if you can code in html.
Provides unlimited space and records.
Gives an opportunity to have a database on EU servers to comply with GDPR
Offers very good pricing options comparing to competitors (Salesforce, Quickbase, etc.) and offers unlimited space.
Gives an opportunity to share your ideas how to improve the platform, many of which are being implemented
Customers service if very helpful and friendly. All my questions were answered within a couple hours.
The only down side that I see, is that you have to be willing to spend some time creating your database. You start with a blank canvas and all the tools you need to design a custom database. But, you have to take the time to do it. If you take that time, it is well worth it.
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.
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
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.
Quickbase is a good product which I have been using for 5 years (powerful, nice interface) but - not so powerful as TeamDesk - started to move toward large companies (>50 people) - more expensive than TeamDesk Zoho was not as flexible as TeamDesk Caspio was not as powerful as TeamDesk
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.
The per user cost is significantly lower than any prior option we have tried. The time spent getting things set up was time well spent for the overall long-term savings.
