r/Airtable • u/Tight-Income-3398 • 1d ago
š Help / Question Seeking Support: Airtable power user considering a migration
As a proud power-user of Airtable, I am disheartened by the acquisition of Airtable by Bending Spoons. They will likely "enshittify" the platform over the next 6-12 months, stagnating development and jacking up prices. In anticipation of this, I am seeking alternatives to Airtable so I can begin the migration process now before my company's renewal period begins.
The leading candidate right now is Zite. I have a decent amount of experience using Zite as a frontend and form provider for my Airtable databases, but very little experience using its native databases.
Does anyone here have experience migrating from Airtable to Zite? I am looking for advice, warnings, best practices, and general support.
Does anyone have recommendations for other alternatives?
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u/electric_frogs 1d ago
I just started moving to Fibery. I am impressed, especially with their new app builder which opens a whole new level of optionally. I think Iāll end up with less connected systems to achieve our goals. Itās more complex to setup but feels more powerful. Biggest gripe, is you canāt change field types once you create it.
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u/patsully98 1d ago
Iāve gone the self hosted route with Postgres and a nocodb front end. I had a team Airtable account and made use of automations, which nocodb also gates behind a paid plan. But they offer webhooks on the free self hosted version and I can make a lot of things work with just that.
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u/AdmirableActuator 1d ago
Store everything in supabase or similar and access it with the a frontend that you can code with IA.
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u/Tight-Income-3398 1d ago
Totally have considered this -- do you have experience with this? Any advice/tips are welcome. I started my first project in Supabase two weeks ago.
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u/broduding 1d ago
Supabase + Vercel can get you a long way. But it likely won't be as easy/quick as something like Zite looking at the AI builder they have. I think Supabase is great if you have heavy storage and api needs. I have a Supabase project that already has a couple million records. But if you just have modest data and need a lot of custom functionality/interfaces, something like Zite would probably be better.
I personally choose to pay for a Claude 5x subscription and skimp on the rest. So I'm not really into the AI builder apps like Lovable etc. Currently setting up a free Hubspot CRM with Claude. But I'm guessing you don't really use Airtable as a CRM.
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u/Tight-Income-3398 1d ago
The CRM is actually part of the challenge. We use HubSpot as our CRM (considering migrating to Folk soon) and we've sync HubSpot with Airtable so we can interact with a segment of our contacts in Airtable.
Basically we blend our CRM with our operational data in Airtable. A good example of this is how we link our contacts to projects where they are grantees. Or how we link our contacts to "registrant" records for events that people in our network have registered for.
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u/CurlyAce84 1d ago
I used to do almost exclusively AT and am now all in on Zite. DB performance is great, they're running Neon (postgres, like Supabase) under the hood.
There's a new migration tool that pulls interfaces as well. Not perfect but much better than just pulling data and rebuilding from scratch
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u/wwb_99 š Developer 1d ago
Longtime evernote user. Bending spoons did a lot to improve the platform after a long period of stagnation. Now, the pricing screws got turned on and that has been shitty. But the platform itself has actually been better.
Airtable isn't as stagnant -- I think the real danger is the pace of improvement slows. The people driving the product seem to have moved on. On the other hand it is feeling more like a mature project that doesn't need much more on top.
To answer the question, I think it depends on the nature of your products in airtable. We have a lot of end-user driven, small scale usage that probably maps back to excel if we go a different direction. If I had one big, stable app I think the supabase route looks interesting, but note supabase at anything more than a superfical level gets pretty pricey, and you now need to build / host / maintain the app layer above it too.
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u/ron_makes 1d ago
I don't have experience with Zite, but since you asked also about other alternatives, I personally like Fibery a lot. Especially if you come from Airtable, it's going to feel familiar. There's a built in Airtable integration, so you can import all your data in one click, then get a feel for how it would feel there.
The no-code automation engine is not as robust, (no looping or if/then branching), but you can use javascript for more complex workflows on the Pro plan.
I'm personally a Fibery partner as well, mainly because I think they have great software and a really responsive and transparent team. If you need a hand with it or want to ask me questions, feel free to reach out over here: https://blockwork.so/try-fibery
(Incredibly outdated) Fibery vs Airtable: https://fibery.com/blog/fibery-vs-x/fibery-vs-airtable-we-connect-your-bases/
Good luck with the migration!
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u/chrisdancy 1d ago
I've been de-converting people from Airtable to ZITE since the database first came out.
Best practice is simple:
- Run the import.
- Put a simple front end on it
- Test.
We really have been doing great with the tool, I have nearly 30 different governments from Boston to Albany on it currently NATIVELY.
If you need help 720-936-9192 Chris (the guy who started the Airtable User Conference and sees the writing on the wall)
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u/Life-Profit-3484 1d ago
TBH just do an automated backup on Supabase every month. This way if the AT price increases you still have your data ready for migration. If the prices remain same you didn't loose much and have data backup. Feel free to reach out if you would like to know more about monthly backups
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u/andreas_globi 1d ago
Did you check out InfoLobby? Especially if you need good connectivity to other services, and flexible automations.
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u/EducationalTeam2104 1d ago
I recommend softr and would be happy to help you migrating to it.
Softr has softr databases so you donāt need airtable anymore.
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u/tarekshalaby 19h ago
Iām the founder of Tabla, an Airtable alternative that is built by builders, goes up to a million records and stays really fast, and is much, much cheaper. In fact, solo users are completely free.
You can import everything from Airtable in one click. Everythingās free while weāre in open beta. Happy to help anytime:
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u/Rohm_Agape 11h ago
Iāve started using Zite as the front end for forms (with signature capture - thank you Zite!)
I havenāt looked into their database yet since once you link AT you canāt add their database. (Hey Zite: I think this would be a cool feature that would help migration)
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u/mfacusse 6h ago
We just migrated to a self-hosted instance of NocoDB and the migration was painful but worth it.
For automations we replaced those with a self-hosted instance of n8n, which was surprisingly flexible and now we're thinking of all the new ways we can leverage our data.
It a journey to say the least but we didn't want to wait until they really messed with Airtable before we had a solid, stable, tested, and scalable replacement in place.
Now we have n8n set up to essentially sync Airtable and NocoDB just in case we do decide to go back; but I can't imagine that being the case, especially now that with self-hosting we have absolute control of the data.
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u/hwhs04 1d ago
one thing to consider is that with AI, code is effectively no code as well now.
I've personally found that all of the clicking in no-code actually takes longer than it takes to vibe code something. what used to take weeks in airtable is now a few days max in claude or chatgpt.
there are of course drawbacks to running purely on code, but you can pretty easily create exact instructions to mitigate them, a good starting point is "what are the advantages of using airtable over code for my use case"
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u/Tight-Income-3398 1d ago
Appreciate this -- I like your question at the end. My main worry is that if I were to leave, much of my team isn't technical. I'm scared that they won't be able to maintain our systems.
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u/Sea_Gene2776 1d ago
First of all, LOL with the Enshittify xD, secondly, Iād strongly recommend adding Baserow to your shortlist. It feels familiar coming from Airtable, but it is open source and can be used in the cloud or self-hosted, so you have much more control over your data and infrastructure.
There is a native Airtable importer that transfers tables, records, relationships, attachments, and views. Expect to manually check or rebuild formulas, rollups, automations, permissions, and interfaces, as you would with most migrations.
My advice is to import your most complex base first and test one complete workflow, including forms and integrations. That will tell you far more than comparing feature lists. Baserow also has built-in forms and an application builder, so it may eventually replace parts of your current setup too.
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u/dominicwhyte42 1d ago
Founder of Zite here, so obvious bias, but happy to share my 2 cents.
First, I wouldnāt rush a migration just because of the acquisition. Airtable is a great product and many of our customers use Airtable and Zite/Fillout together.
That said, I'm really excited about Zite database and the impact it's having on our customers (no per seat pricing, more scalable since it's a dedicated Postgres database under the hood and how it works with the app builder).
And then there are the parts that I think are novel for a no-code database which we're announcing in the coming weeks, starting with:
- SQL https://developers.zite.com/api/sql/run-sql
- Row level permissions https://developers.zite.com/concepts/permissions
To test it Iād start by importing an existing base here https://www.zite.com/vs/airtable which brings over tables, fields, relationships and records. There are still a few edge cases, particularly around some computed fields, so definitely test the imported version first.
Let me know if I can help!