Their main competitor Fieldbook shut down earlier this year. I liked Fieldbook better because it was faster and had a cleaner UI, but Airtable always had more features and better pricing. I’ve migrated over to Airtable now, and I’m happy they’ve raised this round because they’re definitely here to stay.
Their main competitor should be considered Salesforce.
I know at my own company we moved to Salesforce NOT because of its CRM capabilities, but because it's basically a managed database with app-building capabilities. Lots of point-and-click stuff, and lots of development tools too.
I think we're just starting to see this space heat up. The basic capabilities have existed forever at the "enterprise" level (think SAP, Oracle, Microsoft with Access and Sharepoint, etc).
But the focus on making the promise of relational databases available to everyone -- with minimal computer science expertise required -- is what's sort of new and, in my opinion, now taking off.
I think nowdays they also compete with Notion. Their features start to overlap a lot.
Coda is another one to keep an eye on https://coda.io/welcome
Coda and notion both seem to be in the space of dropbox paper crossed with confluence crossed with airtable. I feel like these have more promise than airtable in the long run, or perhaps if dropbox paper starts adding more functionality with their own tables, having different views, apis, workflows.
Our org uses Salesforce for exactly that purpose. Unfortunately the deeper reality is that the value in this database is that non-database-savvy individuals can arbitrarily modify the data schema through a simple GUI tool leading to Objects/Tables with hundreds of fields, computed properties, and other often undocumented pitfalls and dependencies.
As might be expected this yields large numbers of performance penalties and application level work-arounds that deeply slow application development and neuter the quality of often business-critical tools.
It's my theory that the reason such platforms are allowed to exist without employees immediately breaking out in open rebellion is because the users of Salesforce and similar products are often non-technical enterprise workers whose quality bar has been welded by management and past experiences to be lower than the Mariana Trench.
This is definitely a real challenge. No argument from me.
I think the niche where this product can thrive -- and its a huge niche -- is all those small-to-medium size businesses that have so far been running things through a hodge podge of unconnected spreadsheets, obsolete special-purpose applications, and lots and lots of paper.
It's easy as a programmer to more or less forget that most people, when facing a task or challenge, do not think: "I wonder what the most efficient way to do this might be, and if technology could help." Instead, it's: "What methods do I already know that I could apply to this problem?"
More often than not, the answer is paper. And email. Or excel.
So this type of the-database-is-everything app has huge value. Unfortunately it won't be run entirely by engineers with 10+ years of experience in what makes for good database best practice.
It's the trade-off we have to make.
In return, we get:
- A single system that has access to all of the business' data (rather than a dozen different "systems" [if they can be called that] which do not interoperate in any way, with endless duplication and data entry. - Customization (for better and worse) - Radically simplified I.T.: Just give everyone a chromebook and be done with it. - Access to these systems anywhere in the world (cause it's web)
It's better than paying a bookkeeper to (literally) manage paper-based ledgers.
This. See my comment above about Zoho. I've used both, and it's the cheaper/easier to use version of SFDC.
I always thought of Airtable as a simpler FileMaker for the web - just to mention another comparison.
FYI - Zoho CRM's rebuild (from about 2 years ago) is a super user-friendly version of SFDC at a fraction of the price. Has many of the functionalities you just mentioned.
IMO - Their main competition is Excel.
Zoho customer support is so terrible the company should not be used for anything mission critical.
Our account was closed because we kept getting strange credit card billing errors. No amount of calls or emails would resolve it. Just kept getting "we don't see errors on our end" despite us sending screenshots and trying different cards from different issuers. We literally could not pay for the service so out account was shut.
It was bizarre.
They are not even remotely playing in the same league. Zoho's product is a testament to the capabilities of unlimited human resources tasked with building features and stopping exactly at the point where each feature "works."
I would be willing to put money on a Salesforce acquisition within the next two years.
Ding ding ding
Previous HN discussion on why Fieldbook shut down: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17052333
Are they similar? I looked at Airtable after fieldbook shut down, but they didn’t really seem comparable.
I really really loved Fieldbook. I’m sad to see them shutdown.
I’m pretty sure I’m gonna end up quitting my job and building a better Fieldbook next year.
AirTable is nice and they have an insane amount of funding now but their interface leaves a lot to be desired.