A few years ago there were many Airtables articles on HN and it seemed to me it was promoted as a table/database management of some sort for non-technical people.
But now I see Airtable is used a lot in marketing departments and I caught a glimpse of a screen the other day and my marketing colleague's Airtable dashboard looked like a mix between Trello and messaging.
Can someone explain to me how Airtable is being used by non-technical people ?
And can Baserow fill that role too or is it a database thingy first and foremost ?
edit: does it have anything to do with templates ?
With regards to the airtable question, it has the potential to replace almost any CRUD app in a company. Internally we needed to drastically extend our ERP implementation to handle a large custom project and instead of dedicating a dev team to working on it we were able to build the needs out in airtable and then add a few API hooks here and there to the ERP. It was a great success and probably took 1/20th the time since the people that needed to use it were moderately technical and could define and build the workflow as they went. Now less technical people are being onboarded onto it which has, for the most part, worked well. I think the growth areas are going to come from things like stacker.app that make it easier to wrap Airtable databases up in a simple UI.
In general, you can think of it like a better realized version of Access, it brings relational databases into an Excel like view that semi-technical people can understand, then wraps it up with a few excellent built-in views like a kanban board, a simple form, and a calendar that non-technical people can understand. It has definite limitations but an easy to use API to expand upon it when you need it.
I'm really bullish on it after the project and have moved a bunch of personal stuff that was using external services onto a single airtable instance (contact management/CRM, personal project tracking, etc.)
I do bookkeeping and office backend administration for a small sales company. I use Airtable as a semi-technical person to automate processes we used to drive by hand in a google spreadsheet - the main one being commission calculation.
I was able to put this together in the 10-15 hours per week that remains after I finish my core job responsibilities.
I want to learn how to do things the 'real-code' way but the learning curve is steep! Low code tools like Airtable let me use the limited time I have available to get something up and running. I can add improvements incrementally as my skills expand.
When I first set up the Airtable, I was importing data manually from our CRM and from our accounting software. Now I have an awful Postman collection rigged up that does the importing for me (but I have to click a button everyday to run it).
I discovered Pipedream a few months ago and have used that to set up an email system that queries the Airtable database and returns relevant records. A sales rep enters an opportunity and gets an email with a list of leads tailored to that particular opportunity. This incentivizes the reps to add their data to the system.
My next project is to set up emails to notify our new freight coordinator when a load needs to ship, that will query multiple related records and give her all the info she needs in one email, plus cc'ing the sales rep on the deal so they can coordinate.
Our CRM almost does all of these things but there's always some limitation that holds us back, if we're just trying to use the out-of-the box tools.
As someone who aspires to be a developer but is not there yet skill-wise, I really appreciate the low-code tools that let me stitch together horrible Frankenstein monsters of Javascript to let me automate some of the monkey work that I would otherwise be doing by hand.
This then frees up my time to expand my skill-set and learn better ways of doing things. (Such as node.js on a Heroku server so I can put my javascript all in one place instead of scattered throughout all the little places you can put code in Postman.)
But now I see Airtable is used a lot in marketing departments and I caught a glimpse of a screen the other day and my marketing colleague's Airtable dashboard looked like a mix between Trello and messaging.
Can someone explain to me how Airtable is being used by non-technical people ?
And can Baserow fill that role too or is it a database thingy first and foremost ?
edit: does it have anything to do with templates ?