Airtable review

Airtable is a spreadsheet-database hybrid that lets a team build grid, kanban, calendar, gallery and form views over a relational-ish set of records, backed by native automations and a growing AI layer. It’s also the database Softr is most often built on top of. Pricing runs free for a small base, then $24 to $54 a month per seat before volume discounts, and the company changed hands in September 2026: Bending Spoons, the Nasdaq-listed Italian app conglomerate behind Evernote and WeTransfer, closed a $1.285 billion cash acquisition of Airtable on September 4. G2 rates it 4.6 out of 5 from 3,303 reviews and Capterra 4.6 out of 5 from 2,250 reviews, the largest sample of any tool in this guide. Trustpilot tells a different story: 2.0 out of 5 from 159 reviews.

What Airtable is for

Each base behaves like a spreadsheet with a database underneath it: fields have real types (linked records, lookups, rollups, attachments), and the same data renders as a grid, kanban board, calendar or gallery without re-entering anything. Interface Designer sits on top of a base and builds a lightweight internal dashboard, enough for simple ops tools without reaching for a separate app builder. Automations handle the usual triggers and actions, and Airtable’s AI layer has grown out from there. Airtable also counts 654-plus technology and channel partnerships, which is why purpose-built app layers like Softr exist to sit on top of an Airtable base rather than replace it.

What you get on each plan

Airtable charges per editor seat, meaning anyone with edit permission on at least one base, not by total users. Viewers, form submitters and share-link visitors stay free and uncapped on Team and Business. Free caps out at 5 editors. The structural catch sits between Team and Business: moving from a $20 to a $45 per-seat monthly rate, with no step in between, is a 125% jump, and it lands exactly when a base crosses 50,000 records, a ceiling real usage tends to hit sooner than the headline pricing suggests.

The Bending Spoons acquisition, and why it matters for buyers

This is the fact that should shape how you read every other number on this page. Bending Spoons signed the deal to buy Airtable on August 4, 2026, and closed it a month later, on September 4. Five weeks after that, on October 12, Airtable’s new product lead, a Bending Spoons appointee, announced the company was parting ways with a large portion of its pre-acquisition team.

Bending Spoons has done this before, and the pattern is public record, not speculation. It acquired Evernote in late 2022 and, within about two years, raised the price of a personal annual plan from $69.99 to $129.99, an 86% increase. Later, in November 2025, it introduced storage limits that had never existed on the product before and pushed power users toward a new $250-a-year tier. It acquired WeTransfer in mid-2024 and cut 75% of its staff within weeks, then capped free-tier transfers shortly after. Neither move was hidden; both are documented across multiple independent sources as the same acquire-then-monetize sequence.

None of this means Airtable’s current pricing or support changes tomorrow. The plans and limits in the table above are accurate as of October 30, 2026. It does mean a buyer should budget for the possibility of a price increase, a feature cut or a support slowdown sometime in the next year or two, the way Evernote and WeTransfer customers eventually had to, rather than treating today’s Airtable as a locked-in long-term default.

What users say in reviews

The gap between Airtable’s review platforms is the clearest signal in this guide. G2 (4.6/5, 3,303 reviews) and Capterra (4.6/5, 2,250 reviews) both reflect a large, satisfied user base evaluating the product on capability. Trustpilot (2.0/5, 159 reviews) reflects something narrower and angrier: 61% of its reviews are one star, and the complaints cluster tightly around per-seat billing, the Team-to-Business price jump, slow support response, and billing that continues after a cancellation request. That’s not a scattered set of unrelated gripes. It’s one root cause, seat-based pricing, showing up across several related complaints.

Who should skip it

Airtable is a weak fit for a team that needs several editors rather than mostly viewers; the per-seat cost compounds faster than most buyers expect once past 5 or 6 active editors. A team that’s already decided per-seat pricing is the wrong model should look at Knack instead, which charges by records and storage with unlimited users on every tier. A team that wants Airtable’s database depth but zero acquisition risk should weigh Baserow, the only self-hosted, open-source option in this guide. For a side-by-side of all four, see Best No-Code App Builders and Databases. Anyone who wants to put a real client-facing app or portal on top of an Airtable base, rather than relying on Interface Designer alone, should read the Softr review next.