Notion and Airtable have many similarities:
- Both are productivity tools.
- Both are priced reasonably.
- Both have many templates to help you get started.
- Both have a slight learning curve to maximize their features.
- Both are aesthetic and have excellent glance value information.
- Both can be used as a project management software to collaborate with your team.
But beyond this, Notion and Airtable are from two different planets. In this article, I’ll compare the two to help you determine when you should use which tool and for what use case.
The TL;DR: Use Notion for text-heavy things — like your company’s knowledge base, onboarding documents, and even blog articles. Switch to Airtable for databases and spreadsheets. Better yet — embed your Airtable into Notion using Plus.
Notion is for knowledge management, Airtable is for database management
If Notion is supercharged Google Docs, Airtable is advanced Google Sheets.
Does this mean you can’t write on Airtable and can’t create spreadsheets on Notion? No, but it isn’t about what you can do — it’s what the tool is built for.
At its core, Notion is a note-taking app. It opens to a Page and builds from there. Airtable, on the other hand, opens to a spreadsheet.
Notion is highly customizable and modular — you can interlink pages within pages with an almost endless nesting of documents.
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While this gives you a lot of flexibility to create a personalized organizational system, it also makes it laborious to find a specific piece of data quickly. It might be A-OK as a basic CRM or for personal use, but what happens when you want to handle over 2,000 survey responses from your customers? There is a search feature, but indexing will make it hard to sift through repetitive entries when the data is vast.
First-time users of your Notion might also be overwhelmed because they don’t know how deeply each data set is nested.
Airtable, on the other hand, has a more strictly defined organizational hierarchy. All data is stored in a database, and each database can contain as many as 1,000 tables — which you can organize in different views.
It’s that simple — no complicated nesting of pages within pages or databases within databases. You can’t modify the structure — which might limit some scope of customization — but it also makes it easy to skim through data and find exactly what you’re looking for in no time. Airtable can also handle more databases, while Notion might get buggy and slow with many entries.
This isn’t a Notion problem — it’s created to be ideal for documents and reading. If I try to paste a wall of text on Airtable, it’ll be just as cumbersome as Notion is in databases.
For example, suppose I’m creating an employee directory on Notion and Airtable and using one column to write performance review notes. In comparison, Airtable’s long text column is cluttered, while Notion's is clean, simple, and neat.
Airtable isn’t made for handling large blocks of text, just like Notion isn’t adept at managing an extensive database. The formatting, intuitiveness, and management of heavy text are far easier in Notion. You can’t add background colors, emojis, dropdown toggles, and more in Airtable.
To conclude:
- For all things text-related — whether that’s your knowledge hub, remote work policies, or journal entry — Notion is better than Airtable.
- For everything database and spreadsheet related — like customer surveys, managing your large team’s responsibilities, or tracking your big project — Airtable beats Notion.
But you don’t have to compromise and choose one. What if you could view your Airtable data on your Notion page?
Use Plus’ browser extension to embed your Airtable into your Notion — think of Plus as a screenshot that updates in real-time to give live views of Airtable within Notion.
Not just this: You can use Plus to embed whatever you want in Notion — whether it’s embedding your Google Calendar or your Spotify playlist — and it’ll keep updating in real-time.
Notion is more cost-effective
The pricing of Notion and Airtable hardly differ — both have free plans, and the paid plans for Notion start at $8/month while they start at $10/month for Airtable.
Notion might look only slightly cheaper than Airtable, but if you look closely, the plans also differ in attachment sizes and how many people you can invite into your workspace.
- Airtable’s free plan lets you invite five creators or editors, while Notion’s free plan lets you invite ten guests.
- Airtable enables you to add 5000 records per base in the Plus plan, while Notion’s Plus plan allows unlimited blocks for teams.
- Airtable’s Plus plan allows 5GB attachments per base, but Notion allows unlimited file support in its Plus plan.
Blocks and databases differ quite significantly, but the pricing options make one thing clear: Notion is more suited for a small business looking for a basic tool to get things done. It’s the more pocket-friendly option. Airtable is better for mid-sized companies looking to refine their project management and processes.
Airtable has more secure sharing capabilities
If you’re a new startup, you might consider using Notion as your first landing page. But the downside of using Notion links is anyone with the link sees everything in your database. Even if you try to filter and hide some views, users can find a workaround within the Notion nests and see your hidden fields. This raises security concerns for many users.
Notion users have found methods to combat this issue by using third-party apps like Make or Notion2Sheets, but it shouldn’t be so tricky to partially share a database in a productivity tool.
Airtable is far ahead in sharing capabilities. It offers granular control where you can create a shared view and handpick which fields you want to be visible and which you want to be hidden — along with overarching read-only or edit-everything access options.
Let’s say you only want to share selected fields with your new HR Associate so they can keep track of the date of birth, salaries, and more. You don’t want to share your private notes, who they report to, and other fields. Doing this in Airtable is a cakewalk.
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While Notion might make more sense for creating shareable web pages, it’s unsafe to use it to share your confidential databases with hidden properties.
Notion wins community
No one touches Notion when it comes to community. Airtable has its forums, external communities, and freelance specialists — but it’s nothing compared to Notion’s community.
Notion’s users have built entire businesses around using the tool, and it doesn’t fall short in nourishing its creators. Look at Marie Poulin.
The best part? Notion’s community acts like a built-in support for each other. Millions of Notion’s customers share their workflows, processes, and templates because you can customize the app on a large scale. It makes you feel like a part of an exclusive club.
Airtable triumphs automations
Similar to the Notion vs. ClickUp battle, Notion sorely loses in automations.
On Airtable, creating automations is easy because the app offers native integrations with many popular tools like Slack, Gmail, and even Salesforce (SF available only in enterprise plans).
Even newbies in tech can create automations without scratching their heads in Airtable. It’s also possible to make your automations more complex by adding your desired conditions.
Automations are a huge time-saver for all organizations trying to integrate various tools they use without missing a beat.
You can use third-party integration tools in Notion to achieve the same level of automation. Still, it’s not as convenient as being able to do it natively without the hassle of a third party tool in between.
However, the automation game can significantly change with Notion’s acquisition of Automate.io — a step forward by Notion to offer native integrations and strong automation capabilities.
Notion is easier to build
Because the functionalities of Notion are limited, it’s easier to build. You’d likely be more comfortable with a text-heavy software than a complex programmable spreadsheet like Airtable.
Even when you’re beginning to set up the two apps, database creation looks easier on Notion than at Airtable. The former is a bit more intuitive and lightweight compared to the latter.
That said, both apps require some setup, and their templates can come to your rescue.
Resource: Get organized with these daily planner Notion template
Airtable has built-in forms
Let’s say you want to survey your employees about their workload and mental well-being. In Airtable, you can create a new database with your questions in the fields and create a shareable form view link.
Now, you can share the form company-wide, and all data will be collected and collated on Airtable without you lifting a finger. On the paid plans, you can even customize your forms with your brand logo and a cover image. From secret Santa to customer feedback collection — Airtable’s forms can come in handy.
Forms also have many individual use cases — like creating a form to track your habits, mood, and working hours.
Notion’s forms aren’t native to the app or as easy to use, and it’s too expensive to remove Notion’s branding (it costs extra — not a part of their paid plans).
Notion has an AI assistant
Notion recently launched its AI assistant to help you brainstorm ideas, write a rough draft, summarize meeting notes, and more.
It’s still not perfect in its outputs — you need to edit and refine it a bit — but it’ll surely improve with time. Airtable has no such AI assistant to help you analyze data or generate ideas.
ClickUp has excellent reporting features
If reporting is important to your team, ClickUp is a no-brainer choice. With its wide variety of extensions, you can create systems to track any data you like and create custom reports.
For example, if you want a pie chart of your employees by department:
- Step 1: Get the Charts & Reports extension
- Step 2: Choose your database of employee directory details
- Step 3: Select the pie chart option from the various reporting types
- Step 5: Enter “department” in the categories section
And voila! You have your pie chart in five clicks.
The Airtable marketplace has so many extensions available that it’d be easy for all types of companies to get reports on the metrics that matter to them.
Notion, in contrast, doesn’t have any natively supported reporting. Even the third-party add-ons track the number of views per Notion page and not specific database metrics.
Notion vs. Airtable: Don’t settle for one
Notion and Airtable are both productivity tools, but they fulfill two entirely different needs.
Airtable is more suitable for when:
- You want to collect and organize data
- You’re dealing with complex data sets
- Your need advanced Google Sheets
Notion is more suitable for when:
- You want to create something text-heavy, like a knowledge hub
- You’re organizing large blocks of text
- You need advanced Google Docs
As you’ll notice from the use cases, Notion and Airtable are on two different spectrums. For your company’s onboarding process, you need Notion. For managing customer feedback and surveys at scale, you’d prefer Airtable.
Instead of settling for one, combine both using Plus. Any Airtable data you embed using Plus will update in real-time on your Notion page. Don’t take just my word for it: Try and see for yourself.
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