Best alternatives to Google Sheets for automation workflows

Other Questions Airtable
1

I’ve been working with Google Sheets a lot in my N8N automation workflows, but I ran into a problem yesterday. Got some kind of rate limiting error that stopped my flow from working properly. It looks like Google has restrictions on how many API calls you can make per minute.

This got me thinking about what other people use for their production workflows. Are there better options than Google Sheets when you need to handle lots of data operations? I’m curious if switching to something like Airtable or maybe a proper database would solve these rate limit issues.

What do you folks recommend for production environments? Has anyone else dealt with similar API limitations?

2

I made the same switch from Google Sheets to PostgreSQL on Railway about six months ago - hit those rate limits constantly. Night and day difference. No more throttling, way faster operations. Setting it up with N8N was pretty easy with their built-in PostgreSQL nodes. Had to learn basic SQL but totally worth it. You can run thousands of operations without sweating API limits, plus the data integrity beats spreadsheets hands down. For production stuff, treating data as actual database records instead of spreadsheet rows makes debugging and scaling way easier. Cost’s about the same as Google Workspace when you factor in how much more reliable it is.