I don't get it
me neither, but i also don't use spreadsheets much
Airtable gets $52M in funding
111–120 of 199 posts
Re: Airtable gets $52M in funding
#112Original Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8373914 [alternatives link removed]
all the alternatives are fairly mediocre, I tried them all. The closest thing is google spreadsheets, which really is not designed for RDBMS / light database work. You can read my review on alternativeto.net as well. https://alternativeto.net/software/airtable/reviews/
[deleted]
Re: Airtable gets $52M in funding
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
These alternatives are not alternatives at all.
Thanks! I glanced very briefly after a Google search, and will reply later when I have time to my own comment with a legitimate list of alternatives.
I would suggest taking look at Quick Base [1]. We've been using it for years and I've found it hits the sweet spot for us in the complex spreadsheet/light database space.
I've been following Airtable for a while and I have high hopes they continue their upward trajectory. I like where they are going, and they seem like the most likely alternative if we were to move, but Quick Base still seems to have a leg up in a lot of areas. Cross Application/Database Connections, Webhooks Support, and automated table sync from Dropbox/Box/SFTP just to name a few.
Re: Airtable gets $52M in funding
#114Airtable seams cool but i have a hard time understanding where in the market they are. Like between Excel and a relational db app? Not sure about that. Some things that often fail in excel is: * You cant easily verify what the user writes. * It is hard to stop users from destroying the formulas that make it work. * It becomes slow when the row count starts to go up. * You cant have user roles where some users is supp…
>* You cant easily verify what the user writes.
Sharepoint somewhat handles that with file locking and had some revision history and permissions support. Most people just put spreadsheets on shared folders, so of course they get blown up.
Airtable is basically an enterprise swiss army knife for solving trench-fighting issues. That's basically the market, freeing up developers to handle main projects to make it worth the company's time to employ them.
Some rando department needs a form for their new employees or needs to spreadsheet-collaborate? Instead of building some custom webapp, Airtable is a central point for those kinds of things where a more specialized workflow solution doesn't exist.
Re: Airtable gets $52M in funding
#115this makes me sad because this is the idea I've been building in my head for a long time now. :( I need to make a free and open source alternative based off of my ideas..
Re: Airtable gets $52M in funding
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wouldn't compare Airtable to Google Spreadsheets or Excel for that matter. It looks more like a non-buggy Web 2.0 FoxPro, an RDBMS with a user-friendly UX.
I wish it was a Web 2.0 FoxPro. It’s maybe the closest, but the price model is too much. You could buy foxpro for $1200 and create 100 databases with all sorts of janky workflows used within your small business. Paying $20/user/infinity for lower amounts of records doesn’t quite fit that niche. And so the hacked processes with Google Docs and now Excel365 continue. Hopefully with this new funding, Airtable can fix th…
What's the price sweet spot here assuming unlimited (or near unlimited) records allowed?
Re: Airtable gets $52M in funding
#117Feels to me a bit like Filemaker Pro!
Other than that, isn't their real competition Quickbase?
Re: Airtable gets $52M in funding
#118I don't know man, I might not be the target audience (MD of a software company) but I just don't get this. It seems only slightly more useful than say a Google spreadsheet on a platform that yes might have blocks and templates but I didn't see anything there that made me want to switch away from Google Spreadsheets, Trello and a couple of other systems I use to run my 20 person £1mm turnover business. I'll keep it in…
Spolsky's discussion of Excel is probably the best way to understand Airtable: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2012/01/06/how-trello-is-diff... > Over the next two weeks we visited dozens of Excel customers, and did not see anyone using Excel to actually perform what you would call “calculations.” Almost all of them were using Excel because it was a convenient way to create a table. > What was I talking about? Oh yeah…
But then Google Sheets might be a better call.
Re: Airtable gets $52M in funding
#119This is pretty similar to DabbleDB. I wonder why this was so much more successful than DabbleDB. https://techcrunch.com/2006/03/11/dabbledb-online-app-buildi... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wZmYMWKLkY
Re: Airtable gets $52M in funding
#120Airtable is awesome. We have been throwing out a ton of self-built admin forms and CRUD pages by Airtable bases. Now people inside the company can add new fields, versioning by default, super simple interface. Largest con: No webhooks. Which makes you pull data every X minutes to find out if a record changed. I would throw them a lot more money (280$/month now) if they just had webhooks as it could replace a TON inte…
Likewise, I am foaming at the mouth to replace some internal google sheets with air table but as you mention, webhook capability is table stakes to front the effort.