I’ve been working with Airtable’s basic free version for a personal project and love how adaptable it is. Now my company is getting bigger and I’m running into limits like restricted automation cycles and viewing options.
For people handling operations, marketing content, or product management tasks with Airtable:
- What subscription level do you use (Team/Business/Enterprise)?
- What convinced you the upgrade was worthwhile?
- Were there any capabilities you thought you’d get but didn’t?
I’m trying to decide if it’s still valuable when you scale up or if there’s something better for managing work across different departments.
we switched from Airtable to Notion after hitting the limits of the business tier. automation restrictions were really tough to deal with, and integrations can get super pricey. it’s ok for simple project tracking, but for serious workflow automation, you’ll need to pay for zapier too, which doubles your monthly costs.
We upgraded to the Business tier 18 months ago when our team reached 25 people. The limitations of the Team tier’s automation were hindering us, as different departments struggled to synchronize data effectively. We required the advanced interface designer and improved permission controls to allow finance to access specific fields without viewing unrelated information during project timelines. The initial price jump was significant, but the time savings from automation justified the expense within three months. Additionally, the ability to customize the interface encouraged our non-technical staff to engage with the platform, reducing their reliance on Excel exports. However, I found the reporting features lacking compared to dedicated BI tools, prompting us to maintain our existing dashboard for executive reporting.
Been using Enterprise for two years with 150 people. Honestly, going from Team to Business made a bigger difference than Business to Enterprise for daily use. The sync features sold us - we connect Salesforce customer data straight into our project bases and it saves hours of manual entry every week. The detailed permissions became essential when we started letting contractors access some bases while blocking them from sensitive stuff. Didn’t expect the performance boost though - queries and form submissions got way faster with big datasets. Just heads up, the per-user cost adds up fast. Make sure you check who actually needs full access vs just read-only.