What is our primary use case?
I primarily support communications organizations using Airtable’s enterprise version for workflows involving master calendars, content and asset repositories, media CRMs, social media planning and publishing, tracking performance/metrics, and more. Additionally, I use it for managing my business (e.g., invoicing, tracking clients, etc.). It has many different use cases.
How has it helped my organization?
Airtable's ability to bring people from different teams and geographies together into say a master calendar, with complete control over who sees what when and in what format, is highly beneficial for communications organizations. It can serve as that single source of truth reflecting real-time updates, which is a common pain point for my clients whose communications plans are constantly shifting and evolving. It's always enjoyable when I first introduce Airtable to a group of communicators, and they have that "light bulb" moment of realizing its true potential for their workflows. However, one of the cons and pros is its flexibility and customizability, which can be overwhelming for those who don't consider themselves technically savvy or lack time to learn about all it has to offer. While there's a learning curve and setup required to make it truly useful and automated, once you overcome that, it can be a powerful tool for both small-scale and large-scale businesses.
What is most valuable?
The most valuable feature of Airtable is enabling users who might not have otherwise been interested or able to use a relational database in a way that is user-friendly and relatable. The grid view makes it feel relatable, as most users have opened an Excel worksheet at some point in their lives, and the ability to link records across tables to summarize and report on your data is the foundation of its power. Additionally, I'm a big fan of some of the newer features Airtable has added since I first started building bases: automations, record templates, default options for single and multi-select fields, and conditional formatting for interface forms. These are the features that stand out to me when proposing new builds or recommending updates to existing bases for clients.
What needs improvement?
Reporting, specifically anything involving exports, could be improved. The recent rollout of interfaces, and visual presentations of the underlying data, was a great step in the right direction to make reporting more executive-friendly. More work needs to be done to make it more user-friendly to get your data out of Airtable in simple and clean ways. It can be overwhelming for teams who may not be familiar with the backend and are faced with numerous formula fields or lookup fields to be able to summarize their data in a way that can be exported. Additionally, there is work to be done for users to be able to design exports of data groups for reporting purposes. The good news is that Airtable is actively working to improve exports.
As I mentioned, I’m a big fan of Airtable Automations. That said, there is an opportunity to streamline duplicative automations by adding a trigger that covers both matches and updates. Currently, you need both a matches XYZ conditions trigger for an automation and an updated record trigger for an automation to capture when something is first created and then when it's updated. This means two separate automations to keep the same field/output updated. Airtable releasing a trigger that captured both the creation and future updates would be super handy and cut down the number of automations needed to maintain data accuracy for this example.
Another feature I'd like to see is an easier way to self-link within tables. When you link records across tables, the link is automatically created within both records, but self-linking within a table requires manual linking and/or the creation of a complex automation to do it for you. It took several hours to come up with a suitable workaround to capture when a parent record changed in the child record’s linked field. In an ideal world, you would use two different tables, but then you hit the challenge of plotting those two tables on the same calendar, which has its own set of more technical workarounds.
For how long have I used the solution?
I started using Airtable in 2017. Personally, I use the Pro version, and for my clients, I’m using the enterprise version.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It is a stable solution. I would rate it a ten out of ten.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
I would rate the scalability a ten out of ten.
How are customer service and support?
If you are an enterprise customer paying for a lot of licenses, I would give them a ten out of ten. That makes up the bulk of my experience interacting with their service and support. However, it is often shared across Airtable communities and forums that the level of service and turnaround time drastically varies based on how much you’re spending with Airtable.
How would you rate customer service and support?
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup of buying a license and creating an account is straightforward. License pricing is reasonable. As I mentioned above, building bases is more complicated, as it takes planning and resources.
What was our ROI?
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Several competitors were evaluated back in the day when I first started using Airtable, but none offered the flexibility, customization, and scale of Airtable at the time. More recently, one of my clients even went through a rigorous RFP process of current options and landed on Airtable for similar reasons.
What other advice do I have?
Due to the flexibility and customizability of Airtable I highly recommend leaning on someone from the sales or support team to help you mockup a base example related to your use case. It appears as a blank slate when you create a new base, and a quick mockup would help with understanding how it actually works. It's in Airtable’s and the purchasers’ best interests to get to that "light bulb" moment quickly, especially for individuals who are new to Airtable or who have only worked with older versions and might not be familiar with all its capabilities. It is hard to fully appreciate the power of Airtable for your needs by clicking through their website or opening up some templates.
Overall, I would rate it eight out of ten.
*Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
