Airtable made this category. If you are reading this you have probably built
something real in it, it probably works, and the question is not whether
Airtable is good software. It is whether the two things it cannot change about
itself matter to you.
Those two things are where your rows live and what the second year costs.
The product tour, silent by design. Full-resolution video.
Where the rows live
Airtable is a hosted product. Your data is in their infrastructure, and the
answer to "which sub-processors touch our production records" is their list, not
yours.
Appdor is a work OS that sits on top of a Postgres database rather than
inside a vendor's. The database is the system of record, it is ordinary
Postgres, and you can point psql at it. The whole install is:
curl -fsSL https://get.appdor.com/appdor-latest.tar.gz | docker load
curl -fsSLO https://get.appdor.com/docker-compose.yml
docker run --rm ghcr.io/nebosa-company/appdor generate-keys > .env
docker compose up -d
For a lot of teams that difference is worth nothing, and I would rather say so
than pretend otherwise. It becomes worth something the first time a customer
contract names a jurisdiction, an auditor asks for the schema, or somebody wants
a read-replica for the warehouse team.
What the second year costs
This is the part that surprises people, because it is not the sticker price.
Airtable's Team plan is $20 per editor per month on annual billing;
Business is $45. The jump between them is the interesting number:
it is a 125% increase, and the features that force it — field-level
permissions, SAML, admin controls, more records per base — are the ones a team
needs precisely when it has stopped being a pilot.
| Airtable | Appdor | |
|---|---|---|
| Entry paid tier | $20 per editor / month | see the pricing page |
| Next tier up | $45 per editor / month | one step, not a cliff |
| Views behind a plan | Gantt and timeline are paid tiers | all 12, every plan |
| Charts behind a plan | extensions vary by tier | all 25, every plan |
| Records per base | capped, and the cap is a tier feature | your Postgres |
| Read-only viewers | free | free |
| Self-hosting | not offered | the same build you would pay us to host |
The row that matters most is the one about views. Appdor ships 12 view
types, 48 page elements, 25 chart types and
24 dashboard widgets, and none of them is a plan tier. The
plan decides seats, support and who runs the servers. It does not decide which
of the product you are allowed to use.
What Airtable does that we do not
A comparison post that finds nothing good to say about the other product is an
advertisement, so:
- The ecosystem. Airtable's marketplace, its extension gallery and the sheer number of people who already know it are real advantages, and a smaller product does not have them.
- Interface Designer is mature and has had years of polish.
- Sync from other bases is a first-class feature there.
If those are load-bearing for you, that is a reasonable reason to stay.
The migration, honestly
Your rows will move. Every tool in this category exports CSV and the rows come
out fine.
What does not come out is the logic — the formula columns are the part that
stalls migrations, because an export gives you the last computed value and loses
the expression that produced it. Appdor reads 7 competitor formula
dialects, Airtable's among them, and recompiles the expression rather than
freezing its output. That is covered properly in its own post.
It is not a promise that every expression survives. A function with no
counterpart is reported rather than guessed at, and that list of refusals is
your real migration backlog.
Originally published at appdor.com. I build Appdor, so weigh accordingly.
