Comparison between Spreadsheet & AirTable

I use Airtable and I am wondering if someone could compare features and benefits between Spreadsheet and AirTable. Thanks

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Welcome @Selwyn_Gishen.

We don’t have a formal comparison between Airtable and Spreadsheet.com yet though this is a common enough question that we will likely have one down the road.

A short answer is that Spreadsheet.com is an actual spreadsheet with additional capabilities, whereas products like Airtable are relational databases with some characteristics of a spreadsheet.

A longer answer is that a spreadsheet allows you a greater degree of flexibility than a database. In a spreadsheet you can put any kind of data in any cell that you want, whereas in a database you can only define data types at the column level. Similarly, spreadsheets allow you to write formulas that reference specific cells and ranges using A1-style references, for example =SUM(B10:B20)/$A$12. However, with a database you can only write formulas that reference fields in the same record (i.e. row).

There are many more capabilities that are only available in spreadsheets and not in databases, such as cell level styling, merge cells, cross-sheet formulas, and support for 400+ formula functions with identical syntax to Excel and Google Sheets. For these reasons, you will rarely find a financial statement, model or budget in a database, they’re just not flexible enough to use for a large percentage of spreadsheet use cases.

We designed Spreadsheet.com from the ground up as a traditional spreadsheet with the capabilities of a database and project management system. One that maintains fidelity and backward compatibility with traditional spreadsheets so you don’t have to sacrifice the flexibility, familiarity, and calculation power of the spreadsheet you know in order to gain new capabilities found in modern collaborative work management systems.

Our template gallery has many examples that illustrate the differences, such as:

Hope this helps you and others with this question.
Matt

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That ability to reference cells in other rows, is a very huge advantage over relational databases like AirTable.

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… if I may chime in. I would also say that having this live & active community is a big plus over airtable. this team was very open in the beginning of listening to the comparisons. So, if there’s something that you think spreadsheet[dot]com could benefit from, please share. I have no doubt that as this project continues to grow it will surpass airtable in the “spreadsheet” game.

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Thank you for your support and suggestions @benjamin_gunter! Feedback is a gift and we’re lucky to have early users like you creating conversation here in the community where everyone benefits.

Hi, I use Notion as a CRM, but I can not freeze columns or rows so I stumbled into this since I had decided to give spreassheets a chance and WOW, I am amazed at the versatility, I just started exploring a few minutes ago and wanted to confirm if I can achieve close if not the same results for databases

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Welcome to the community Robert!
Thank you for the kind words, happy to have you.

We do support freeze rows/columns. Let us know if you get stuck anywhere whilst working on your use-case. Happy to help.

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spreadsheet.com is a game changer for us. We compared with smartsheet, airtable, Smartsuite, Clickup but this product is sooo much better than competitors

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@6_Stars_Cleaning - Happy New Year ! :slight_smile:

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