Except Notion is far more capable than Airtable. You can do all these table joins across pages but in Notion everything is a page whereas in Airtable it's just a form. That is the ultimate flexibility which makes it exceptionally well suited for any kind planning effort. And it's a great canvas for creative projects.
It's amazing to see that there's a billion dollar company building something comparatively so... bad.
Plus Notion has some of the best customer service around. Half the company are there for support!
I've taken a look at it, and it seems to have all the amenities I wanted. It seems to have most everything I was using Airtable for, but what I really like is all the rich text formatting I can do to organize knowledge.
I'll definitely consider switching. Thank you!
It is like a better looking BaseCamp + Airtable in one.
Or put differently: I think we overlook how many people might be overwhelmed with building their very own specific todo list in something like Notion or to a lesser degree Airtable, compared to a solution that provides a fixed, rigid set of fields.
I use neither of them but my preference goes to the web since I work on Linux.
The one downside compared to airtable seems to be no automatic backups. But the ability to format notes is super handy!
https://www.notion.so/What-s-New-157765353f2c4705bd45474e5ba...
1. https://community.airtable.com/t/add-new-linked-record-when-...
2. https://community.airtable.com/t/random-number-functions/129...
Edit: Formatting
In short, from my usage so far, I like that everything is a document in Notion. Coda is more capable in other ways - I can summon up chats of my data and define new formulas. I love that buttons let me effectively create a little webapp that also works beautifully on mobile.
One thing I'm trying out with the qa guys (keep in mind very small team) is a list of test cases with buttons for pass/fail/dnt for each. Clicking pass or fail updates the status and test date for that row. You can also have actions in coda trigger integrations. So one thing we were discussing was notifying slack immediately when a test case fails.
Don't know where it will go - both products seem excellent so far.
However, since then Coda has also added an API, which is really interesting. Other folks have mentioned Notion, which is also great, but Coda honestly felt like the closer competitor to Airtable while Notion felt like they were fighting Dropbox Paper.
Ugh, same in Grid View.
I use it for PM work also, and it's still the closest thing to useful I've found.
I feel like Airtable is very unresponsive. On the community forums, they seem to communicate rarely, and not implement very simple functionality for long periods of time. Very good features that would be highly beneficial and should take a weekend go months without even a reply.
It's death by a thousand cuts for me. Sorts in Kanban view don't automatically resort when you add cards, so you have to manually resort every time. No rich text formatting on cards. Copying tables doesn't copy the field type. There's so many minor things I'd like changed.
None of the problems by themselves are deal-breakers by themselves, and I will continue to use Airtable (Trello, for instance, does not offer the field customization I love about Airtable). But I can't help but think execution can be so much better.
It's almost like nobody at Airtable pays attention to the design of features. Everything is so limited. Blocks are an incredibly useful idea, but in practice uncustomizable and not something I find helpful.
It's a good product, but not a great product.
I've been considering working on my own product in this line. At least if nobody else uses it, I'll be able to.