Table of Contents
- Softr for Airtable-powered internal tools
- Stacker to build customer portals from Airtable
- Adalo to build mobile apps powered by Airtable
- Documint to create Airtable documents
- Abyssale to create images from Airtable data
- Zapier to automate and sync Airtable data
- ProBackup to backup and restore Airtable data
- Fillout for Airtable forms
- Build more in Airtable with built-in extensions
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Airtable is an app builder. A database. A tool to pull data and visualizations together into a custom CRM, ERP, HR, or project management tool for your team.
With your data all in one place, you can put it to work. Visualize it. Edit it. Build documents and send emails from it. Print shipping labels, track customer loyalty, or power a mobile app where your team can gather and edit data on the go with it.
For that, you need add-ons. Extras. Companion apps that complement Airtable. Here are the best tools to turn Airtable into your company’s operating system.
Softr for Airtable-powered internal tools
Airtable’s views can turn your database into a calendar or kanban board, and with widgets and forms you can get pretty close to approximating an app. It’ll always feel more like a customized database than a bespoke piece of software.
Which is where Softr comes in. It’s like Webflow or Framer, for building responsive web apps powered by your Airtable database. Start with a premade template to learn how to use it. Add blocks and filters to list Airtable content, forms to enter new data, charts to visualize it, maps and more to make it feel like a real app. Then build a new app connected to your Airtable database to build the internal tools your company needs. Softr pulls in your database data so what you see when you’re building your app is exactly what you’ll get.
Softr Pricing: Free for unlimited visitors and up to 5 internal users; from $49/month for 10 internal and 1,000 external app users
Stacker to build customer portals from Airtable
Want to share your Airtable data with others—team members, clients, freelancers, even customers—without sharing everything in your Airtable account? Or building a member-only community or data bank, powered by Airtable? Stacker’s one of the easiest ways to share a more restricted, filtered version of an Airtable database.
Connect your Airtable account, and Stacker will automatically turn it into a standard app layout, with tabs for each table in your database. It’s more limited—you can’t endlessly customize your Airtable-powered app—but you’ll get something usable pulled together far more quickly.
Then bring in everyone who needs access. Have your clients or customers stored in Airtable? Stacker can turn that contact list into an invite list, letting each of those people see their data—and nothing else. That way, you could let customers view their order details and clients view their project updates without sharing your entire Airtable account.
Stacker Pricing: From $59/month for 1 app with 10,000 records and unlimited external users
Adalo to build mobile apps powered by Airtable
Or, build a real app, something people can download from the App Store and Google Play stores and run directly on their devices, even when they’re offline—all powered by Airtable. That’s what Adalo offers with its more advanced Airtable-powered app builder.
It’s a bit more complicated to integrate Airtable with Adalo. You’ll need to create a personal access token and configure API calls, among other setup tasks. That’s worth the extra trouble for the advanced features Adalo offers to build multi-page apps connected with logic.
Tweak your branding and design across the app. Build light and dark mode themes. Add standard menus, forms, navigation, buttons, and more, and tie them all together into a working app. When everything’s just right, you can publish your app to the App Store and Google Play, for a full-featured mobile app running on your Airtable data, without writing a single line of code.
Adalo Pricing: Free for test apps with 200 records per app; from $52/month to publish to the App Store and Google Play store
Documint to create Airtable documents
Airtable’s built-in Page Designer can create eSigned PDF documents from individual records. Want to create documents for every record in your Airtable database, though—plus new documents every time a new record is added?
Documint is built just for that. Design a document template with drag-and-drop elements, add variables to gather names, dates, prices, and other important info. Link variables together, so you only have to enter a name once instead of every time it’s mentioned, and conditional logic to add or hide sections depending on the data entered. Connect it to Airtable and match Airtable data with your document variables, and Documint can create contracts, invoices, and more automatically every time data’s added to Airtable.
Documint Pricing: Free for 10 documents; from $30/month for 200 documents and Airtable automations
Abyssale to create images from Airtable data
Using Airtable to organize blog posts and marketing campaigns? Abyssale can take your post titles, descriptions, and other details, and turn them into ready-to-share blog headers and social media-sized images.
Start in the Abyssale editor, where you can drag-and-drop images, background colors, and text elements into a layout that fits your CMS or social platform’s dimensions. Then connect it to Airtable, and match up each image or text element with the input data from Airtable. You can then bulk-create images from Airtable or manually trigger Abyssale inside of Airtable to create new images.
Then, build an Airtable automation to Tweet new posts paired with their new banner image, or build an Airtable-powered blog using Airtable as a headless CMS with your new auto-generated banners used as headers or sharing metadata. And if you want more visualizations, check out MapChart to turn your Airtable data into detailed maps—perfect for data-driven content.
Abyssale Pricing: From $39/month to create 1000 images
Zapier to automate and sync Airtable data
You’d like to send an email to clients in your Airtable CRM whenever their status changes, and remind your team to follow up in Slack. You want to copy each new Airtable record over to Google Sheets, and use that data to create Google Docs documents. You want to link multiple Airtable accounts, copying new data across as needed, automatically.
That, and much more, is possible with Zapier. It’s an app automation platform that connects to thousands of apps to create detailed workflows. Whenever something happens in one app, you can use Zapier to make other things happen, as a Rube Goldberg machine of productive technology. If other tools help you bring data into Airtable more easily and present it like an app for your customers and team members, Zapier takes care of all the other things your app should do, sending messages and notifications and creating documents and archiving data and more in the background. It’s the logic engine for your Airtable-powered software, without you needing to write any code.
Zapier Pricing: Free for 100 tasks a month on single-step workflows; from $19.99/month for 750 tasks/month and multi-step Zaps
ProBackup to backup and restore Airtable data
You could set a reminder to download a CSV of your Airtable account every so often to back up your data. Zapier, Make, or Airtable automations could copy your Airtable row data over to Google Sheets or another spreadsheet app, while Coupler can sync your Airtable data to another database tool and transform data at the same time, if needed (attachments might be harder to copy out, though). Airtable itself also includes snapshots, from 2 weeks on free accounts to 3 years on Enterprise plans, to restore accidentally deleted data.
For additional piece of mind, one of the few ways to fully back up everything in Airtable—including file attachments, images, and formulas in tables—is ProBackup. Connect your Airtable and Google accounts, and it will automatically save everything you’ve saved to Airtable. You can browse through the data inside ProBackup, view folders of files and spreadsheets of data in Google Drive, or click Restore in any view to bring back a full database or table, or a single record, to Airtable in seconds. Much like an auto-backup on your WordPress blog or a backup tool on your computer, it’s a set-it-and-forget-it tool that quietly keeps a second copy of your data saved, ready if you ever need it. And if much of your company runs on SaaS tools, ProBackup also supports Asana, Basecamp, Slack, Notion, Trello, HubSpot, and more to keep all of your team data backed up together.
ProBackup Pricing: From $9/month for weekly backups for 1 app with up to 4GB storage
Fillout for Airtable forms
We’re biased, but we’re pretty sure Fillout’s the best way to build Airtable forms. We’ve built it from the ground up around databases, with filters, logic, and conversion tools that make your forms capture the data you need every time, and design tools to build branded forms manually or with AI.
Connect your Airtable database to Fillout, and you can drag-and-drop your Airtable fields into your form, to quickly add contacts and create tasks and more without having to manually connect fields. You’ve already put the work into setting up Airtable; Fillout keeps you from duplicating that effort. You can even drag in linked Airtable fields to let form respondents select from existing products, projects, and more from your Airtable database—or create new linked entries right from your form. Or, you can update existing Airtable entries from a form to keep your Airtable database duplicate-free and up-to-date.
Then, add logic to filter responses. Clearbit and Google Maps integrations in Fillout’s conversion kit to fill in contact and location data. Calendly or Cal.com to schedule events, or Stripe to process payments, right from your form. Use AI to add additional form fields in seconds. Everything your respondents enter will be saved to Airtable automatically. It’s a powerful way to build almost any data-entry workflow on top of Airtable.
Fillout Pricing: Free for unlimited forms and 1,000 entries per month; from $15/month for premium fields and submission overages
Build more in Airtable with built-in extensions
Some of the best Airtable companion tools, though, come built-in as Airtable extensions. With a paid Airtable account, you can add charts, import CSV spreadsheets and ICS calendar files, fetch data from external sources, write scripts in code, create visualizations from JSON data, deduplicate data, batch update records, and use Google Vision to extract text from scanned business cards and other images. That, plus 3rd-party integrations from Miro, SendGrid, Jira, and more to pull data into Airtable, and scripts to get you started building more advanced workflows from your data.
Each of those tools are powered by the data in your Airtable database. You need the easiest ways to gather data, make sure it’s complete, then organize it into Airtable as quickly as possible—exactly how Fillout helps simplify your Airtable forms workflow. Create a free Fillout account, link your Airtable, and start building the powerful forms your team needs.
Written by
Matthew Guay is a writer and co-founder of Pith and Pip. He previously was founding editor of Capiche and Zapier’s senior writer and editor.
