Airtable - Relational Data Management Made Easy
February 08, 2018
Airtable - Relational Data Management Made Easy
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Airtable
Airtable is being used by the international office of our university to help manage our institutional relationships with partner universities overseas. Given the volume of data our team is responsible for capturing, the ability to associate and interrogate the data using database features while interacting with a familiar spreadsheet view has been especially important for onboarding our team to Airtable.
- Straightforward: Easy to use interface, the spreadsheet layout is familiar for all our users to engage with.
- Appealing: The visual design of Airtable is pleasant and does not distract from the data, which can be easily manipulated and interrogated to produce shareable reports.
- Extensible: The platform is very easy to extend based on our specific business requirements, by utilising their API we have been able to pull information directly onto our website to display the data in a manner consistent with our own branding and visual guidelines.
- Some of the features integral to our business need are restricted to paid accounts.
- Within each table managing large numbers of views can become slightly complex.
- The inability to grant granular permissions to user groups impacts our ability to introduce more colleagues to our Airtable.
- Previously our department managed a variety of disconnected spreadsheets, Word documents and email correspondence that involved related work processes but was wholly unconnected. With the transition to Airtable all data is interconnected, enabling our team to make data-driven decisions based off intelligence gleaned from using the platform to interrogate the data to identify links and relationships that were previously undiscovered, or poorly recorded.
- Airtable provides a straight-forward process to share reports with internal senior stakeholders and also embed reports onto our internal facing website. By cutting down on manual creation of monthly reports and instead just providing access to our most recent automated report our time is better spent developing business for the university.
- Because Airtable integrates tasks with a calendar view we are able to track partnership developments in a more granular manner than was previously possible. This allows us to stay on top of our relationships with business clients, acting in a proactive manner.
Podio - From our perspective, Podio was the most familiar product to Airtable, however ultimately we found the user interface of Airtable far more engaging and familiar to work with. Furthermore, Podio really struggled when trying to interact with greater volumes of data, the platform felt clunky and we weren't confident it could expand to accommodate our own internal growth without eventually slowing us down.
Trello - The platform is great for managing tasks but is severely restricted when it comes to managing non-task related data. Furthermore, Trello as a platform, had far less scope to change the way data was displayed from the default Kanban view, which was already provided as a free option in Airtable.
Zoho CRM - Too many of the features basic to our business need were completely hidden behind a pay-wall, plus their pricing was far less competitive than other providers on the market. While Airtable does restrict certain features to paying customers, we felt that the free plan Airtable offered was by far and away the most generous on the market in terms of functionality and space.
Trello - The platform is great for managing tasks but is severely restricted when it comes to managing non-task related data. Furthermore, Trello as a platform, had far less scope to change the way data was displayed from the default Kanban view, which was already provided as a free option in Airtable.
Zoho CRM - Too many of the features basic to our business need were completely hidden behind a pay-wall, plus their pricing was far less competitive than other providers on the market. While Airtable does restrict certain features to paying customers, we felt that the free plan Airtable offered was by far and away the most generous on the market in terms of functionality and space.