Why teams keep comparing Airtable and Sheets
When people ask me if Airtable is just a fancier version of Google Sheets, I usually laugh and say it depends what mood your team is in. I had a moment last month where my automations stopped working in Airtable for no reason, and I seriously thought about moving the whole setup back into Sheets. But here is the thing — Sheets works like scratch paper, Airtable works more like a database. If your team has ever done the thing where you are copying a column and pasting it into another tab just to make a client report look nice, then you already know the pain that Airtable tries to solve. The tradeoff is you have to teach your team to think in fields and linked records instead of just tossing everything into cells.
Airtable lets you set data types like attachments, checkboxes, and linked records. Google Sheets does not care. It will let you paste a picture inside a cell if you twist the formula hard enough, but when you try to filter by that image you immediately realize Sheets was never built for that. Airtable feels like it holds your hand with structured data, which means fewer broken formulas later. I remember watching someone on my team try to format ZIP codes in Sheets so they would keep the leading zero. Airtable just stores it as text and no one fights with it again.
Setting up a simple project tracker
I have built the same project tracker three times in Airtable and four times in Sheets, mostly because automations kept breaking. In Sheets, the fastest way is just making columns: Task, Owner, Due Date, Status. Then you add some conditional formatting — turn the cell red if the due date is before today. That part is easy for anyone to understand.
In Airtable, you build it like a mini app. You pick table names like Tasks, Team, and maybe Clients. Then you link records across them. Once you add a linked record field that jumps between tables, it feels powerful at first, then half your coworkers have no idea what happened when they click on a row and suddenly see a popup of related records. 🙂 That is where the chaos starts. But the upside is that Airtable stops you from manually duplicating data everywhere. Your client name gets typed once in the Clients table, and that same name flows into every task that is connected.
If you need a quick mental picture, it is like Sheets is a flat list and Airtable is a filing cabinet with drawers that talk to each other. The first feels chaotic but flexible, the second feels structured but asks you to learn how the drawers open.
Sharing and editing with teammates
Google Sheets is still unbeatable for raw sharing. You send one link, toggle between view or edit access, and people are in. I have had contractors open Sheets links right on their phones and edit without losing context. Airtable does this weird thing where viewers have to be invited, or you have to share a whole view as a public link. It is clunky when you want the same freedom that Sheets offers.
What I love in Airtable, though, is field level control. I have let interns edit certain columns but locked the rest, which is impossible in Google Sheets unless you use the Protect Range feature everywhere. One time I tried that in Sheets and ended up locking myself out of half the formulas by accident. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ Airtable just has checkboxes for who can edit specific fields, and it feels safe enough.
Automation and integrations breaking without warning
The emotional rollercoaster of Airtable automations is something Sheets simply does not prepare you for. In Sheets, you mostly rely on Google Apps Script. It is nerdy but predictable: if you mess up a semicolon, it tells you. In Airtable, I have had perfectly fine automations suddenly fail because of some vague error message like “record not found.” That actually happened when I added a new view and forgot to include it in the automation filter, and Airtable just errored out silently. No clear log, no hint.
Sheets integrations usually happen through Zapier or Make. Airtable has its own automation panel built in, which sounds great until you discover it is picky about triggers. I once set it to “when record enters a view,” and it literally did nothing for an hour. Then it fired six times in a row and spammed all my coworkers. Nobody trusted it again after that.
Cost differences you actually feel
Google Sheets cost basically blends into your Google Workspace subscription. You almost forget you pay for it. Airtable is where pricing starts feeling real because the free version runs out of records fast, and once your team hits the limit you are stuck. At one point I was trying to keep a film project in Airtable’s free plan, and we hit the record wall halfway through production. We had to hack around it by exporting some records to CSV and archiving them. It worked, but it was not fun.
The weird part is that Airtable feels worth it once you cross a certain threshold. If your team runs major workflows out of it, you do not flinch at the price because recreating the same setup in Sheets would cost hours in extra formulas and frustration. A coworker once suggested we could save money by moving back to Sheets, but nobody wanted to give up the views in Airtable that let them switch from grid to Kanban to calendar instantly. Those things feel small until you lose them.
When to choose Airtable without regrets
If your project absolutely depends on structure, Airtable just works better. For example, I track video editing requests with dozens of status options, file attachments, reviewer names, and timestamps. In Sheets that would be a nightmare of hidden sheets and clunky validation drop downs. In Airtable, those are just field types. Another case was when we managed assets for a client and needed to connect them to campaigns. Airtable made that link natural. Sheets would have meant endless VLOOKUP formulas.
The risk is onboarding. Some people hate it at first. I had one team member ask me “why does this not just look like Excel” and refuse to use it for weeks. Once they realized the benefits of connected data, though, they came around. Airtable forces people to think like database users without them realizing it.
Times when Google Sheets is the simpler answer
Do not underestimate Sheets for small quick projects. Sometimes I get carried away building Airbases (yes they call them that, I did not invent it :P), only to realize I could have solved the problem with one simple spreadsheet. If the thing you are managing will end in a week or is mostly numeric calculations, Sheets wins. Airtable is overkill there and just slows things down.
I keep Sheets open for any kind of scratchpad work. It is amazing how fast you can mock up calculations, do pivot tables, and share them instantly. Project bids, draft budgets, random experiments — Sheets fits naturally. Airtable would feel like setting up a full database for each one, which is not worth the mental load.
The weird gray area between the two tools
The hardest moments are when you want the flexibility of Sheets with the structure of Airtable. That is where most teams get stuck. I eventually created a hybrid workflow: Airtable for structured stuff like clients and projects, and Sheets for calculations and scratch data that changes daily. Then I sync them with Zapier whenever the connections do not break (and they do break, randomly, just like everything else I build).
Funny enough, I once saw on support forums someone wrote “I just need one tool that thinks like Airtable but edits like Sheets.” And honestly that sums it up.
Why I still keep both open
For personal sanity, I trust Sheets when I know something just needs to exist without explanation, and I trust Airtable when I need to manage complicated links that would otherwise tie me in formula knots. Most teams I know run both at the same time. The hardest part is not deciding which is objectively better, but just recognizing which job actually deserves the extra structure.
Sometimes I still rebuild the same project twice in each tool — just to see whether it will implode this time — and usually one or the other does first 🙂