Item: Airtable
Rating: 10
Author: James Shafstall

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Airtable is used by just about everyone in our company. We in marketing use it most extensively - we use it like a CRM to manage our organizations and contacts, a content management system to manage our ad and PR placements, and a budget management system. We are also planning to use it to manage our photos this summer. We are a non-profit so this system is an excellent all-around tool. Maybe not ideal for things like photo management but truthfully it doesn't seem that far off. It is ideal for many things because it's small and easy to use - a regular CRM (Salesforce or other) install would be costly and resource intensive, as would the other types of software we'd need to do everything this is doing. This is doing the job perfectly for our small organization. In my previous job I set up and managed databases for clients so that's why I am blown away by Airtable. It's power comes in its simplicity and flexibility. It really is an amazing tool. And you can take it quite far with the free version of it before you even need to decide whether to spend money on it.

Pros and Cons

One thing Airtable's power comes from is the fact that you can relate databases to each other. So you can have one table for your organizations that you work with, and another separate table for the contacts within those organizations, and then tie them together individually. After doing so it is very easy to jump between the contacts and their organizations profiles, and switch as contact to a different organization instantly. Very powerful when you have multiple contacts within single organizations, or any type of multiple data points that are linked to the same record.
Another thing that makes Airtable powerful is the views. You can filter, sort, and group a big table to show only the things you want to see at a particular time - but then save that view, and many other views, for later use. That way you can switch between different views of the same data on a continual basis, easily and quickly. Or different people can have different filters and sorts and different columns showing on the same table without interfering with each other.

I think this thing has huge potential for us to manage our photos. We take over 10,000 photos a year and Airtable has the capability of easily loading, tagging and sorting them. It even has history and you could store edited versions of each photo within each original photo's profile. However - the ability to view these photos as thumbnails of different sizes, gallery style, is very limited. So that's a big additional feature I'd like to see, some optimization to use this as a photo management system.
If you include numbers into a table, automagically from another table via the rollup or lookup features, then you cannot use those numbers as part of a formula in a subsequent field. This turned out to be a major limiting factor on my using it as a budget manager. (Luckily I came up with a workaround but it makes me add additional columns to the table that add a bit of otherwise unnecessary clutter.)

Return on Investment

If not for Airtable I would have had to pursue a CRM system and an asset management system, plus some sort of task management system for multiple employees, and manage my budget in Excel which is a pain when it gets complex. Airtable lets me put all this in one system, light weight, extremely powerful, and extremely efficient. Exactly what we needed. I am so happy this system exists.
Airtable is free and you can get quite a bit in there and use it for a while before deciding to go to the paid version. Therefore the proof of concept was quite easy to bring it into our organization. We've been using it for a few months and it's made everyone's lives easier, so moving now to the paid version is a no-brainer. I didn't have to ask everyone to take a big leap of faith in the beginning and there was no big up front resource investment either, at least relative to setting up any other software or even complex Excel workbooks.
Several people in our organization have commented that this system has made their lives far easier, because we can now keep track of our tasks and our events. Our key people are both saner and more efficient.
The paid version of Airtable is DIRT CHEAP in comparison to the systems it stands in for. I cannot emphasize this enough.

Alternatives Considered

Oncontact, JIRA Software and Basecamp

I have mostly set up and helped architect custom database solutions in a proprietary software, as compares directly to Airtable. I have set up and used JIRA Software extensively, and several Marketing Automation systems, and set up Oncontact CRM, and used DAM systems, and Basecamp project management. All in all setting up databases and introducing them to organizations is one of my primary skills and I have several years experience doing this within an organization and as a consultant for other organizations. This is why I love Airtable so much - I have never seen something so lightweight, so inexpensive, and so powerful. Pound for pound it whips any system I have ever used. When I think back to all the custom database solutions I've implemented, and other processes I've managed and consulted on within organizations, I can't help but wonder how many of them would have vastly better off with a simple Airtable implementation.

Other Software Used

Microsoft Office 2016, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator CC

Likelihood to Recommend

I think Airtable is ideal for any medium-sized organization to manage contacts and organizations (like a CRM function), content marketing efforts, advertising and PR schedules, events, and perhaps marketing assets (still testing this on our end). I would be interested to see how it would perform managing a medium-sized product database, say a thousand products. I suspect it could do a pretty good job, however I can't speak to it's ability to connect to external systems like to feed a website. My first plan for managing my organization's needs was to install Salesforce as we can get the software for free as a non-profit. After using Airtable, I would encourage anyone to try Airtable first before trying something more complex. Two reasons: A) it's free to try and there is very little setup required before you start getting real use out of it; and B) even if you don't ultimately use it as your main system it is an ideal tool for designing what your data schema is going to look like. But I think many people will be pleasantly surprised to find that they don't need to graduate to a "bigger" system. I suppose where Airtable may not be appropriate would be with a huge organization with tens to hundreds of people managing the data. You would then want something where you can lock down and control more of the inputs on a user group level.

Airtable: Featherweight Champion of the World!

Overall Satisfaction with Airtable