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I use Airtable for my job, mostly as a project management application. This may be an unusual use case, but I find myself limited at many times. I feel like Ai
by Kaveren 8y ago
I use Airtable for my job, mostly as a project management application. This may be an unusual use case, but I find myself limited at many times.
I feel like Airtable is very unresponsive. On the community forums, they seem to communicate rarely, and not implement very simple functionality for long periods of time. Very good features that would be highly beneficial and should take a weekend go months without even a reply.
It's death by a thousand cuts for me. Sorts in Kanban view don't automatically resort when you add cards, so you have to manually resort every time. No rich text formatting on cards. Copying tables doesn't copy the field type. There's so many minor things I'd like changed.
None of the problems by themselves are deal-breakers by themselves, and I will continue to use Airtable (Trello, for instance, does not offer the field customization I love about Airtable). But I can't help but think execution can be so much better.
It's almost like nobody at Airtable pays attention to the design of features. Everything is so limited. Blocks are an incredibly useful idea, but in practice uncustomizable and not something I find helpful.
It's a good product, but not a great product.
I've been considering working on my own product in this line. At least if nobody else uses it, I'll be able to.
- hadsed 8y agoThere is one lurking competitor to Airtable that no one knows: Notion. Except Notion is far more capable than Airtable. You can do all these table joins across pages but in Notion everything is a page whereas in Airtable it's just a form. That is the ultimate flexibility which makes it exceptionally well suited for any kind planning effort. And it's a great canvas for creative projects. It's amazing to see that there's a billion dollar company building something comparatively so... bad. Plus Notion has some of the best customer service around. Half the company are there for support!
- ksec 8y agoI don't understand why there aren't more people using Notion. It is like a better looking BaseCamp + Airtable in one.
- thirdsun 8y agoMy guess is that it's seems rather complicated and intimidating to non-tech users. I've been using and testing Notion for a while but when I consider my non-tech-savvy colleagues I imagine I'd have a much easier time explaining Basecamp and Airtable to them. Airtable feels more inviting compared to Notion. Or put differently: I think we overlook how many people might be overwhelmed with building their very own specific todo list in something like Notion or to a lesser degree Airtable, compared to a solution that provides a fixed, rigid set of fields.
- trystero 8y agoAirtable is web-based, Notion is for desktop use with Windows and macOS clients. I use neither of them but my preference goes to the web since I work on Linux.
- Kaveren 8y agoNotion has a web application you can use, no need to download.
- closed 8y agoWow, your weren't kidding! I did a deep dive to compare airtable to a lot of other planning tools and never even noticed Notion... The one downside compared to airtable seems to be no automatic backups. But the ability to format notes is super handy!
- Kaveren 8y agoThank you for the recommendation, I was not previously aware of Notion. I've taken a look at it, and it seems to have all the amenities I wanted. It seems to have most everything I was using Airtable for, but what I really like is all the rich text formatting I can do to organize knowledge. I'll definitely consider switching. Thank you!
- shreyas-satish 8y agoLove Notion so far, if only it had an API already.
- imsodrunklol 8y agoNotion is such a treat. I need more apis and plugin action though.
- akvadrako 8y agoNotion is nice, but I found it pretty buggy a year ago. And I wish it supported online live chat, like samepage.io.
- m_st 8y agoWow I never heard about this one, even though I was searching such tools. Sure enough, I open DDG, type in "Notion" and can't find anything. "Notion g!" pointed me here though: https://www.notion.so https://www.notion.so
- rukuu001 8y ago> Sorts in Kanban view don't automatically resort when you add cards, so you have to manually resort every time. Ugh, same in Grid View. I use it for PM work also, and it's still the closest thing to useful I've found.
- yhoiseth 8y agoThis has been my experience, too. For example, I wanted to use Airtable for a survey, but after needing two missing features which have been requested for a long time [1, 2], I lost my motivation. 1. https://community.airtable.com/t/add-new-linked-record-when-entering-data-in-a-form/2415/41 https://community.airtable.com/t/add-new-linked-record-when-... 2. https://community.airtable.com/t/random-number-functions/1290/16 https://community.airtable.com/t/random-number-functions/129... Edit: Formatting
- PeOe 8y agoHave you taken a look at https://zenkit.com/ https://zenkit.com/ ?
- PeOe 8y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13022663 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13022663
- mbu 8y agoIn addition to the comment re Notion I'd like to throw out coda.io. Notion is more developed but I think coda has some really promising stuff too. I'm considering both for my current project. I certainly agree that Notion is better than airtable (which I already decided against), I think coda had potential to be even better (but then Notion will improve too). In short, from my usage so far, I like that everything is a document in Notion. Coda is more capable in other ways - I can summon up chats of my data and define new formulas. I love that buttons let me effectively create a little webapp that also works beautifully on mobile. One thing I'm trying out with the qa guys (keep in mind very small team) is a list of test cases with buttons for pass/fail/dnt for each. Clicking pass or fail updates the status and test date for that row. You can also have actions in coda trigger integrations. So one thing we were discussing was notifying slack immediately when a test case fails. Don't know where it will go - both products seem excellent so far.
- mmcclure 8y agoI personally love Airtable, but I do totally understand some of your points. I also went through quite a bit of testing vaguely similar services before settling on Airtable in large part because of their API. However, since then Coda has also added an API, which is really interesting. Other folks have mentioned Notion, which is also great, but Coda honestly felt like the closer competitor to Airtable while Notion felt like they were fighting Dropbox Paper.