10 best Airtable alternatives for 2024

There’s a reason Excel is as synonymous with spreadsheets as Coke is with cola (sorry, Google Sheets!). It’s just that, by defaulting to Excel, you’re missing out on other solutions that could serve your business needs even better.

Today’s knowledge workers need to do more with data, and project management software has come a long way in response. Platforms like Airtable and monday.com bring powerful new functionality to data and project management.

But is Airtable the right fit for your business? And how does it measure up against other platforms out there? Let’s take a look at why so many businesses choose Airtable, and then compare it with 10 other platforms on the market, including monday.com.

What is Airtable?

Airtable is a spreadsheet/database hybrid that enables teams to model, connect and visualize their data and workflows.

With Airtable, your data is stored in a single central source of truth —  called a ‘base’ — which the ‘sheets’ you create link directly to. The benefit of a relational database like Airtable is that it allows you to create the connections between ‘sheets’ and ‘bases’.

Let’s say you need to plan and manage a marketing project and track your leads. Airtable lets you handle all the distinct projects, tasks, clients, ideas, and leads within a single platform.

Rather than entering data directly, as in Excel or Google Sheets, Airtable looks at those connections and pulls data from one place in the database to use in another—all without moving or affecting the bedrock data.

Let’s look at some of the features you can expect from Airtable.

Airtable Key features

• Actionable views: Lists, Timelines, Gantt, Kanban, Calendar — Airtable’s views let you visualize your projects in ways that make sense of your data.
• Interface Designer: Create and customize business-critical apps on top of your existing data, using no-code drag-and-drop elements.
• Customization: Templates — for example, Project Tracker or Event Planner — can give you the building blocks to get started, while the modular structure allows you to personalize the look and feel, as well as how to interact with the data.
• Automation: Set up automated scheduling and alerts to keep workflows on track, and use generative AI to improve productivity.
• Sync: Everything is kept up-to-date, refreshing across the database as data sources are edited.
• Administration and controls: Create and assign tasks for individual users, set due dates and easily drag and drop to manage, define dependencies, and prioritize.

Airtable Pricing

Airtable comes in four different tiers, depending on your scale and needs: Free, Team, Business, and Enterprise.  The Free plan gives individuals and very small teams a single, mobile-accessible workspace with unlimited bases of 1,000 records each. Each base comes with 1GB of attachment space. You can assign up to 5 editors for your workspace with 50 commenters.

The paid tiers offer unlimited editors and commenters, as well as more workspace and increasing allowances for records and storage.

• The Team plan is geared towards teams who want to build simple apps and share workflows. In addition to the greater allowances, it includes additional views and customizations. It costs $20/seat/month if billed annually, or $24 on a monthly basis, and there’s a free trial available.
• For teams and departments who need something more advanced, the Business plan offers premium sync integrations, admin tools and SAML-based single sign-on. It’s priced at $45/seat/month (billed annually), or $54 monthly.
• Finally, the custom-priced Enterprise tier adds administration and governance services and tools for the full organizational experience. You’ll have to request a quote to get the pricing.

More about Airtable pricing here.

All told, Airtable can be a really solid choice for managing your data and centralizing information when you have dispersed teams. That said, it may not be exactly the right fit for your business.

You may want a platform that offers more communication functionality, different views, or maybe a simpler interface. For instance, some users have reported finding Airtable somewhat complex, especially when it comes to making full use of its functions.

Before you make a decision on a project management database solution, it’s good to weigh up your options. Here’s our selection of 10 Airtable alternatives you may want to consider.

1. monday.com

Best for: Teams of any size who need an intuitive and flexible way to visualize project workflows and manage customer relationships.

monday.com’s Work OS platform connects people to processes and systems, covering project management, CRM, Sales, and Marketing. The fully customizable Work OS allows teams to connect tools to run projects and processes all in one place. Automations help improve the efficiency of workflows.

Rather than Airtable’s table layout, monday.com works with dashboards called ‘boards’, that allow teams to create and customize intuitive visual structures for their projects. Whether building a marketing plan or tracking your sales pipeline, monday.com lets you segment and organize and analyze board information as you need.

Key features

• Comprehensive Work OS: centralizes all your work, processes, tools, and files into one Work OS
• Integrations: Connect to over 100 integrated tools without leaving monday.com
• Hundreds of ready-made templates: No matter your use case, we’ve got a customizable template to get you started quickly
• Outstanding customer support: 24/7 phone and email support – no matter which plan you have

Pricing

Monday.com offers a free plan for individuals or freelancers.

Plus four paid tiers for a minimum of 3 users:

• Basic (from $9/seat/month)
• Standard ($12/seat/month)
• Pro ($19/seat/month)
• Enterprise (quote available upon request)

As you move up through the tiers, you access more features, storage space, automations, integrations, and expanded customer support. Learn more about monday.com pricing to find out which plan is best for you.

2. Asana

Best for: Helping team members track their work tasks.

Asana’s centralized work hub lets businesses eliminate silos and helps teams collaborate and coordinate across the organization. Asana is more focused on project management than Airtable, and its task and work management feature makes it easy to break down projects into manageable tasks and visualize progress.

However, it doesn’t have native time tracking, and you might miss the customizable workflows and seamless communication you get with monday.com.

Key features

• Timeline: Keeps you on top of all your project activities. Gantt charts help you monitor and manage dependent and overlapping tasks.
• Workload: Helps you monitor and manage team members’ assigned work, so that you can make sure nobody is underworked or overworked.
• Automation: Lets you cut the manual busywork so you can be more strategic.

Pricing

Asana offers four plans, each with a 30-day free trial.

• Basic  — free for individuals or small teams up to 15 people
• Premium — from $10.99/user/month, billed annually
• Business — from $24.99/user/month
• Enterprise tier — pricing available on application

Find out more about Asana pricing and see how Asana compares to monday.com. 

3. Basecamp

Best for: Communicating and project collaboration for small teams

Basecamp is a user-friendly project management app that lets you easily collaborate and communicate with your colleagues. Built-in tools help teams keep all their project files, tasks, and workflows together on a single page while enabling easy in-app communications.

Key features:

• Dashboard: A one-page menu for your projects, documents, and schedule.
• To-dos: Customizable task lists that can be shared between team members
• Messages: Centralized messaging and group chat that eliminates the need for emails.

Pricing

Basecamp has the following pricing structure:

• Basic — $15/user/month
• Pro Unlimited — $299/month for the organization as a whole if you’re billed annually, or $349 to pay month-by-month

4. ClickUp

Best for: Large or small businesses that want a customizable project management experience.

ClickUp is an all-in-one project management app for every business size. ClickUp lets users pull and analyze data from across the platform. No-code app development makes it very customizable, though some integrations and automations have limitations. ClickUp is used by teams to manage to-do lists, calendars, docs, spreadsheets, and more.

Key Features

• Views: Offers many ways to view your data, from condensed table views to lists, Kanban, Gantt and Calendar, and more
• Goals and Targets to keep teams on track and motivated.
• Assigned Comments to ensure team members put comments into actions

Pricing

ClickUp offers four plans:

• Free Forever gives you unlimited users and tasks, with 100 MB of cloud storage.
• Unlimited plan ($7/user/month) offers unlimited cloud storage, integrations, and dashboards
• Business Plus ($19/user/month) adds team sharing, subtasks, increased automations and API, and priority support.
• Contact sales for a quote on the Enterprise Plan.

Learn more about ClickUp pricing plans here.

5. Glide

Best for: Teams who want to build shareable customizable apps.

Glide helps to build custom business software and basic no-code apps that are powered by your existing data. It connects to spreadsheets such as Excel and databases like Airtable, allowing you to customize and add components and actions.

While your data remains in one central place, you can build custom software for different needs, so that you can share only the data that particular users need.

Key features

• 300+ templates with a drag-and-drop app builder
• Easy and quick data migration and synchronization
• Customized branding for logos, colors, quotes, and more.

Pricing

Glide offers 5 tiers:

• The Free tool allows 2 editors up to 3 apps and pages, with 100 public and 3 private users.
• The Starter tier ($25/month) increases those allowances for individuals
• Pro ($99/month) and Business ($249/month) offer unlimited apps and pages for team and business needs respectively.
• The Enterprise tier (contact Sales for a quote) allows you to customize Glide to meet your needs.