Airtable Vs. Google spreadsheets for APIs
this weekend I was using Airtable and found it amazing. Their auto-generated API documentation and how powerful their properties are with even image uploaders. Wonderful!
however, we were talking earlier with @fajarSiddiq in Telegram that it would be amazing to compare Airtable with Google Spreadsheets. I've not used the later for API, so I'd be curious to know your thoughts
Hey Jorge,
Nice to see their API, I just saw it today and it is very similar to the Open API generated docs, which is what I want for my product. I am building a "database as spreadsheet" product, like Airtable (though super young) but self hosted.
Do you think younger companies or people starting out care much about owning their data?
Most of the potential customers I am talking to are either startups who already have own database and want a better UI on top or mid-sized companies who can not host their data outside their own infrastructure - either too much data or for privacy reasons.
Thanks for any tips, Sumit
Hi @brainless, I'm glad you mentioned this. This is something I occasionally look for—something like an airtable wrapper for personal databases. Some projects will warrant their own database (for privacy and/or scale), but I love the ease of use and viewing of airtable (over, say, pgadmin or other sql clients) and not having to build interfaces. I'm interested and will be following on your site.
Also, take my feedback with a grain of salt. I'm a freelance google sheets developer and would only probably use this for small side projects, so I may not be the target demographic of traditional developer, but it's worth something I hope :)
@brainless yeah, it'll be great to see it grow. For me, personally, it also offers another place where I may be able to offer development consulting as a freelancer. Airtable's been making a lot of additions to their platform lately, too. For simpler projects, Tables may be the route for a lot of people & projects where they only need a simpler setup but like the included addition of simple bots. And it also makes sense for teams that are already in the G Suite infrastructure.
Thanks for your reply @brainless.
Re: "Do you think younger companies or people starting out care much about owning their data?"
I personally don't care to own my data, I like the fact that I can delegate that responsibility to other providers that I trust that are run in the cloud. so I don't need to have a high ownership cost of my data.
@ferreiro Thanks Jorge, I totally understand your choice. This is why I have stopped targeting founders who are just starting up their business. There are high priorities than owning the data in the initial stages. But as a company grows, data ownership becomes critical and I am finding it easier to charge way way higher to mid sized companies anyway.
I've used Airtable for several projects and yet to try Google Sheet. For what it's worth, the API probably gonna be similar when used in the application. All you need is to fetch the data and display it.
The one-push for me to choose Airtable over Google Sheet is probably the ease of inserting the data and connecting data from a different base. I found it super easy to do with Airtable making data entry fast and easier to maintain.
Good to know!
Not sure if this has changed, but people said that there may be limits over the Airtable vs Spreedshit when it comes to free functionalities https://community.kodular.io/t/more-limits-on-airtable-or-google-sheet/44591/7
Wondering if there are any API limits on Airtable that makes spreadsheet better - "The API is limited to 5 requests per second per base. If you exceed this rate, you will receive a 429 status code and will need to wait 30 seconds before subsequent requests will succeed."
I love Airtable for better UI and more interesting features, but Google Sheets has higher limits to the number of rows you can have (which can make a difference if your dataset is huge)
I see! I'm also very interested about the API rate limits, airtable says "5 requests per base" that seems low to me.
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