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Re:Airtable raises $100M at a $1.1B valuation by Kaveren on Thursday November 15, 2018 @08:28PM (#18465398)
I use Airtable for my job, mostly as a project management application. This may be an unusual use case, but I find myself limited at many times.

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.

Re:Airtable raises $100M at a $1.1B valuation by hadsed on Thursday November 15, 2018 @10:26PM (#18466127)
There is one lurking competitor to Airtable that no one knows: Notion.

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!

Re:Airtable raises $100M at a $1.1B valuation by Kaveren on Friday November 16, 2018 @12:26AM (#18466638)
Thank you for the recommendation, I was not previously aware of Notion.

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!

Re:Airtable raises $100M at a $1.1B valuation by m_st on Friday November 16, 2018 @02:33AM (#18467180)
Wow I never heard about this one, even though I was searching such tools. Sure enough, I open DDG, type in "Notion" and can't find anything. "Notion g!" pointed me here though: https://www.notion.so
Re:Airtable raises $100M at a $1.1B valuation by imsodrunklol on Friday November 16, 2018 @01:47AM (#18467005)
Notion is such a treat. I need more apis and plugin action though.
Re:Airtable raises $100M at a $1.1B valuation by ksec on Thursday November 15, 2018 @11:48PM (#18466504)
I don't understand why there aren't more people using Notion.

It is like a better looking BaseCamp + Airtable in one.

Re:Airtable raises $100M at a $1.1B valuation by thirdsun on Friday November 16, 2018 @02:08AM (#18467079)
My guess is that it's seems rather complicated and intimidating to non-tech users. I've been using and testing Notion for a while but when I consider my non-tech-savvy colleagues I imagine I'd have a much easier time explaining Basecamp and Airtable to them. Airtable feels more inviting compared to Notion.

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.

Re:Airtable raises $100M at a $1.1B valuation by trystero on Friday November 16, 2018 @11:06AM (#18469576)
Airtable is web-based, Notion is for desktop use with Windows and macOS clients.

I use neither of them but my preference goes to the web since I work on Linux.

Re:Airtable raises $100M at a $1.1B valuation by Kaveren on Friday November 16, 2018 @11:34AM (#18469769)
Notion has a web application you can use, no need to download.
Re:Airtable raises $100M at a $1.1B valuation by closed on Friday November 16, 2018 @12:05AM (#18466567)
Wow, your weren't kidding! I did a deep dive to compare airtable to a lot of other planning tools and never even noticed Notion...

The one downside compared to airtable seems to be no automatic backups. But the ability to format notes is super handy!

Re:Airtable raises $100M at a $1.1B valuation by shreyas-satish on Friday November 16, 2018 @12:58AM (#18466769)
Love Notion so far, if only it had an API already.
Re:Airtable raises $100M at a $1.1B valuation by L_Rahman on Friday November 16, 2018 @01:35AM (#18466939)
Re:Airtable raises $100M at a $1.1B valuation by iakh on Friday November 16, 2018 @10:18AM (#18469262)
Not sure if you work there but the pay store link is broken. "app not found" when clicking through
Re:Airtable raises $100M at a $1.1B valuation by akvadrako on Friday November 16, 2018 @02:24AM (#18467143)
Notion is nice, but I found it pretty buggy a year ago. And I wish it supported online live chat, like samepage.io.
Re:Airtable raises $100M at a $1.1B valuation by yhoiseth on Thursday November 15, 2018 @11:01PM (#18466283)
This has been my experience, too. For example, I wanted to use Airtable for a survey, but after needing two missing features which have been requested for a long time [1, 2], I lost my motivation.

1. https://community.airtable.com/t/add-new-linked-record-when-...

2. https://community.airtable.com/t/random-number-functions/129...

Edit: Formatting

Re:Airtable raises $100M at a $1.1B valuation by mbu on Friday November 16, 2018 @07:05AM (#18468175)
In addition to the comment re Notion I'd like to throw out coda.io. Notion is more developed but I think coda has some really promising stuff too. I'm considering both for my current project. I certainly agree that Notion is better than airtable (which I already decided against), I think coda had potential to be even better (but then Notion will improve too).

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.

Re:Airtable raises $100M at a $1.1B valuation by mmcclure on Friday November 16, 2018 @12:23PM (#18470130)
I personally love Airtable, but I do totally understand some of your points. I also went through quite a bit of testing vaguely similar services before settling on Airtable in large part because of their API.

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.

Re:Airtable raises $100M at a $1.1B valuation by rukuu001 on Thursday November 15, 2018 @10:27PM (#18466130)
> Sorts in Kanban view don't automatically resort when you add cards, so you have to manually resort every time.

Ugh, same in Grid View.

I use it for PM work also, and it's still the closest thing to useful I've found.

Re:Airtable raises $100M at a $1.1B valuation by PeOe on Friday November 16, 2018 @03:01AM (#18467285)
Have you taken a look at https://zenkit.com/ ?
Re:Airtable raises $100M at a $1.1B valuation by PeOe on Friday November 16, 2018 @08:13AM (#18468478)