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Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

Have you seen AirTable? It's definitely the best modern alternative to Access I've seen - easy to create tables, great web UI and a phenomenal iOS mobile app.

https://www.airtable.com

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Why are the row limits so tight?! 1200 rows for the free tier, and only 5000 rows for the first paid tier!

That's crazy low, given that Google Sheets gives you 200,000 cells, or 10,000 20-column rows, for free.

EDIT: That was from 2009. The current limit is 2,000,000 cells per sheet: https://support.google.com/drive/answer/37603?hl=en

Probably because they are in business to make money? Customers whose first priority is cost usually aren't good customers.

Right, but even their more expensive paid plan has a 50k row limit, which is low enough to preclude whole classes of applications.

They do claim a "custom number" of rows in their "contact us for pricing" plan, but the 50k number suggests that anything higher than that would have serious perf downsides with their current architecture.

I read somewhere that AirTable is deliberately only targeting "human scale" data use cases.

That's a daft statement. Every customer cares about cost. The only difference is the price points.

If that saying meant anything meaningful, Walmart, Safeway, Ford, etc would not exist. I think what you meant to say was, "don't target customers not willing to pay enough for a profit margin." Much less catchy, but at least it's not bullshit.

I said: "Customers whose first priority is cost" (emphasis added)

You said: "Every customer cares about cost"

There's a world of difference right there!

Appreciate you taking the time to comment but starting with "That's a daft statement" and ending with "bullshit", throwing in "I think what you want to say" for good measure? I must have hit a sore spot!

My silly little hobby spreadsheets that would benefit a lot from this are easily >1500 rows.

It is the fastest growing productivity app of the year (I read somewhere based on a metric I cannot recall).

I didn't realize they had an API. I just looked it up and the documentation is so good it makes me tear up.

The trick with the documentation is that it lets you pick one of your own databases and it then makes all the examples relevant to that database!

Why doesn't everyone do that?

I'm actually a bit disappointed by their API as it stands at the moment. Say for example you want to retrieve a record with a bunch of nested records in one go. Currently you have to do that by pulling the first record, then looping through the array of nested IDs for the other records and retrieving each of them in turn.

I want to be able to say "get me back record 56 and all of the linked records in a single request".

I ended up having to iterate over their "fetch all records of type X" endpoints and then gluing the data back together in-memory, which is a pretty nasty workaround.

Cofounder of Airtable here, I hear you and that's on the roadmap :).

Could you spend a couple of minutes to describe the advantages of Airtable over Fieldbook or Ragic? I've been gripped by indecision regarding which tool to use, and hence use none of them.

To be honest, I haven't spent a lot of time using Fieldbook or Ragic. That being said, we spend an insane amount of time/effort making sure that Airtable delivers a first-class product experience. In fact, the first couple years of Airtable's existence involved myself and my cofounder Andrew--who previously PMed the redesign of Google Maps--building countless prototype variants to get the UX right, doing a literal hundred user studies with people from all sorts of industries/roles to understand how the full range of how they used spreadsheets, databases, and other products, and researching the prior art by talking to the creators of past products in the space (i.e. MS Access, Excel, Coghead, Podio, Dabbledb, etc).

We think Airtable is to spreadsheets/Access/Filemaker what Slack is to email (and fwiw, Slack itself uses Airtable http://bit.ly/2m58l4U ).

Specifically, our product offers the following (which to my knowledge Ragic/Fieldbook do not): x IMO a much more intuitive design x Native Android, iPhone, & iPad apps, as well as an electron desktop app ( airtable.com/downloads ) x Ability to create multiple views on the same table, each of which preserves its own filter/sort/visibility settings Multiple view types, including grid, grouped records, calendar, kanban, public forms, and gallery: http://bit.ly/2ky3WLB . x Inline collaboration i.e. @mentions in text fields, record-level comments x Many more useful field types x Visual revision history and snapshots x More integrations, such as with Zapier (see Zapier's writeups http://bit.ly/2lfGr79 http://bit.ly/2l3dZqG ), Slack, native calendars via an iCal feed, and Dropbox/Box/Gdrive/Evernote. x Greater capacity and smoother performance. x Full realtime sync for all changes, including schema modifications. x Lots of little things, like the ability to perform date calculations relative to today (i.e. a filtered view or formula that shows all projects due within 7 days from today and is automatically updated as time goes by), private share-links and embeds to give people access to a read-only view of Airtable without making them sign up for an account, inline document previews (e.g. view a text-copyable inline version of a .DOCX file)

Over 30,000 organizations already use Airtable--this includes tech cos like Airbnb, Box, Wework, and Tesla; non-tech cos like Atlantic Records and Penguin Randomhouse; educational institutions like CMU, Rice, and Stanford. We're growing our team and continuously releasing new enhancements to improve the product experience for all users.

Fieldbook co-founder here, thought I would weigh in. I agree with Howie that he doesn't spend much time using Fieldbook, since we already have many of the features he mentioned.

IMHO Fieldbook has the best user experience anywhere for building and working with a real relational data model, including many-to-many relationships, sophisticated queries, and aggregated reports. We've done a ton of iteration with real users and hundreds of usability tests to make these features natural and intuitive.

Fieldbook customers use it on a daily basis for their core business information and processes, and they're very happy. Read our reviews here: http://www.capterra.com/database-management-software/spotlig...

But there's no need to be gripped by indecision! Just try them both, it's free. That will tell you which one works best for you. Message us in-app if you have any questions, we're happy to help you get set up!

It seems cool. Have you consider letting us trying the demo without asking for credential? The login form have stop me since I do not want to be contacted by your sales.

I had heard of airtable and checked it out and thought: this is exactly what I have needed this whole time. It is a much slicker version of SmartSheet.

And then I just found out about Fieldbook through your comment and it looks really good too. It's the only other product I've seen that is in the ballpark.

And then both founders are right here on HN pointing out more features.

Thank you to both founders for taking the time to write such lengthy responses. I really appreciate the more detailed insight.

Is there a downloadable version of this, paid or free?

No, it's entirely cloud based. You can install their iOS and Android apps but they'll only work if you have an internet connection.

In addition to native mobile apps, we do have a desktop app. It does require internet connectivity though (similar to Slack's app, it's built on electron). Airtable.com/downloads

thanks, did not know this.

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