What is Airtable and what it can do for your product

What is Airtable?

Simply, Airtable takes the best aspects of Google Sheets and Notion, and puts them together. It was founded in 2012 by Howie Liu, Andrew Ofstad, and Emmett Nicholas.

What can you do with Airtable?

Airtable can store information in a spreadsheet that's visually appealing and easy-to-use, but it's also powerful enough to act as a database that businesses can use for customer-relationship management (CRM), task management, project planning, and tracking inventory.

What are the main key features?

Well, it is definitely a very useful tool to help different teams work more efficiently. Here are some key features:

1. Templates to help you quickly create your first Airtable base

As setting up your first workspace can be complex ****for new Airtable users, the software provides hundreds of pre-made templates to help you out.

These templates range from personal projects to conventional business themes, such as:

Regardless what you use an Airtable database for, you can find templates to satisfy your needs.

2. Custom views for different use cases

The Airtable app lets you create different custom Airtable views, like the Calendar view, to help you adapt to your team’s needs.

  • Classic spreadsheet: displays a spreadsheet/ grid view similar to Excel and Google Sheets
  • Calendar: the Calendar view displays Airtable records according to date columns, like submission dates
  • Gallery: card-oriented view that shows file attachments like images and documents
  • Kanban: a Kanban board is a popular stacked-card format used in Agile project management tools like Trello

3. Document storage keeps project files in one place

Airtable lets you store various file attachments in your database records. It also supports multiple formats for your file attachments like:

  • Images and videos.
  • PDF documents.
  • Spreadsheets, including support for a CSV file.

4. Task management and tracking

You can use the tables in your Airtable workspace to enter task data, like how long someone spends on a task. This way, you get quick overviews of project statuses, provided you manually update it on a regular basis.

For added flexibility, you can also share the Calendar view with your teams to plan and manage project timelines and to-do lists.

Main Benefits

While the Airtable branding is basically just a good-looking spreadsheet, it does have a few benefits:

1. Adaptable to all kinds of businesses

Airtable’s UI follows a basic spreadsheet format that can fit almost any business. Its users can choose between the Airtable views that work best for them and even customize data values into several formats, like:

  • Currency
  • Dates
  • Long text
  • Preset values

2. Easily share files and Airtable data

To make up for the lack of team collaboration features, the tool lets Airtable users share files and data with ease. This feature is even offered in the free Airtable plan.

With desktop apps and a mobile app on iOS and Android platforms, you can access your files from anywhere. And with its great file storage limits, you can upload large files for your team to download.

When it comes to sharing your spreadsheet data, Airtable offers a few options:

  • Share links with various viewing permissions.
  • Embed your Airtable base into your websites.
  • Use your base’s Airtable API key to customize your app (all Airtable users have access to their API key through the Airtable API documentation).
  • Transfer your data into Google Sheets through the Airtable Importer, Zapier or other apps that support an Airtable integration.

These options let you share your Airtable database or results with anyone you want.

3. Integrations

You can also integrate third-party app plugins via Blocks into your Airtable database to streamline your existing workflows.

Airtable has built-in support for many popular apps and a robust API. Use Zapier, Workato, Integromat, or Automate.io to connect Airtable with over 1000 websites and apps.

How do we use Airtable at Minimum.run?

At Minimum.run we use Airtable internally to organize and manage leads and collaborators data bases. We also use it to organize our content marketing projects at mendesaltaren.

We also recommend Airtable to our customers to organize their leads captured through typeform or arengu forms. Others use it as CRM to manage their clients list.

Pricing options

Airtable has both paid and free options.

Free

  • Record limits: 1,200 records/base
  • Attachment space: 2GB/base

Plus

The Airtable Plus plan costs $12/user/month on the monthly billing plan and $10/user/month on the annual billing plan. (Please refer to this article for more discussion of who counts as a user for billing purposes.)

  • Record limits: 5,000 records/base
  • Attachment space: 5GB/base

Pro

The Airtable Pro plan costs $24/user/month on the monthly billing plan and $20/user/month on the annual billing plan. (Please refer to this article for more discussion of who counts as a user for billing purposes.)

  • Record limits: 50,000 records/base
  • Attachment space: 20GB/base

Highlighted projects

These are some of the most popular and useful templates or cases that Airtable give us to work with:

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