Airtable Rocks for Flexibility
Updated February 13, 2018
Airtable Rocks for Flexibility
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Airtable
We use Airtable in a number of ways at two organizations with which I'm associated. At AdPoint Video we use it in three ways:
- We built a bespoke highly-customized CMS (Content Management System) for our ad campaigns.
- We built a lightweight CRM (Client Relationship Management) system that fits our needs at a fraction of the cost of the big name CRMs.
- We use Airtable to manage internal client projects -- similar to a Project Management platform but much more useable for our team.
- We've built out a full-on Project Management System for our polls.
- Several new projects in development are being based on custom dashboards built with Airtable.
- I personally use it to manage my various projects as Director of Innovation.
- Prototyping. Because it's based on the common spreadsheet, everyone gets it, so setting up a database it fast. The flexibility offered in customizing views allows for quick and efficient prototyping.
- Integration. Most organizations have already bought into platforms like Slack, Dropbox, Box, Team Work, Salesforce, etc. That's both good and bad since they all can inhibit flexibility. Airtable plays well with most other SaaS platforms so your team can try out new things and new ways of thinking/organizing without starting from scratch.
- Speed to Team. I've been able to roll out Airtable builds very quickly and make rapid changes in order to make positive impacts on both organizations. Sometimes we've built in Airtable and then, after using it, spent more time and money developing the same thing in a legacy platform because we didn't want "another" platform. Airtable makes that easy too.
- It's not Excel, or even Google Sheets. Airtable has a few significant missing pieces including no functionality around conditional logic. This may be a dealbreaker for some -- it certainly has prevented us from building some dashboards we had hoped to.
- Our use cases almost always involve deadlines and dates -- it would be great if Airtable integrated alerts with Google Calendar, Slack, etc. This is another roadmap wishlist item, not a dealbreaker right now.
- At the end of the day, the variety of Views -- which is the main selling point and value of Airtable over Excel or Sheets -- is still a bit limited. I would love to see the ability to customize the look and layout in ways that would allow for real custom dashboards to be built. NOT a complaint. More like a roadmap wishlist.
- A bit early to tell on pure ROI but Airtable is a relatively inexpensive to roll out new ideas and dashboards so the investment has been low. We've saved $1000s on annual SaaS costs for other platforms that didn't do what we wanted.
We've used (and still use in some cases) other Project Management platforms. Trello is fine but limited to Kanban-oriented projects. I personally love Trello but on in certain use cases. Airtable is way more versatile and has a Kanban view. Teamwork and Zoho are really in another league. We've dropped both because our teams found it took more work to use them than the effort saved. Note that both of the teams I use Airtable with are under 20 people and that's where it shines. I've worked in other organizations with soup-to-nuts platforms like Zoho and they seem fine for what they are.