Airtable - saving us development cost and time
April 03, 2018
Airtable - saving us development cost and time
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Airtable
I run outdoor programming at a large university. We use Airtable in many ways to manage our logistics. For example, we have a campus climbing wall that is using Airtable to track user visits; we use an embedded form to accomplish this. In another example, we run a large backpacking orientation program. We use Airtable to manage the logistics of that program - participant sign-ups, trip assignments, trip campsite and reservation information, etc. Blocks - especially Page Designer - has made reporting data out of Airtable much easier. I moved to Airtable from a custom-built FileMaker Pro database. I find that my student workers can figure out to how to use Airtable on their own. That saves us training time - and it also makes those folks more willing to engage with the tool. I appreciate that Airtable provides much of the power of a relational database without all the time setting up a database in another platform. I also love the ease of the mobile apps - providing me access to my data without needing to design a custom app or Filemaker "layout".
- Relational database without the set-up headaches
- Ease of use - most users can figure it out on their own
- Easily embedded views and forms.
- Reporting - Page Designer (within Blocks) is a good start, but could be greatly improved (easier sorting of related records, for example).
- Updating records - the only way to update records automatically is via Zapier, which can get too pricey for my little operation. If there were a service within Airtable that would do that, it would be much appreciated.
- By moving to Airtable, we were able to avoid a custom-built database system, the quote for which was $8500. Instead, we expect Airtable to keep our costs about $500/year. (We did need to give up some of the power of Filemaker, but we felt the tradeoff was worth it.)
- Airtable has vastly reduced the amount of time we need to spend training users on our systems - it is sufficiently intuitive for most users.
Airtable is much more intuitive to a naive user than Filemaker. Development time is also greatly reduced.