Smartsheet vs Airtable: Which is better for you?
The battle of Smartsheet vs Airtable has its origins in the first spreadsheets appearing back in the 1970s. Spreadsheets have become a vital part of business and project planning. In the past 50 years, they’ve evolved significantly from their initial role in computerised accounting to software that is able to manage, plan, and coordinate entire projects.
Smartsheet and Airtable are taking spreadsheets to another level again. However, while both share the same roots, they have some important differences that could make one a better fit for your team.
In this blog we look at some of their core differences to help you make an informed decision about which is better for you.
What is Smartsheet?
Founded in 2005, Smartsheet is project management software that acts much like a levelled-up excel spreadsheet with inbuilt collaboration features. Through its very familiar interface, Smartsheet helps teams manage projects, allocate tasks, and collaborate with each other on its web-based platform. With simplified functions and features as well as its integrations with prominent enterprise solutions like Microsoft Teams and Adobe, Smartsheets has become a prominent project management tool. Today it sits right up there with the likes of Wrike and Microsoft Project.
What is Airtable?
Founded in 2021, Airtable is a cloud-based collaborative platform that is a kind of hybrid between spreadsheets and databases. It offers the features of a database with the format of a spreadsheet. It also empowers users with little to no coding knowledge to build their own custom collaborative apps where they see a need. Not surprisingly, it has become a popular project management solution for NGOs and marketing teams, as well as smaller teams that benefit from the free version available.
The Comparison
The core differences between them can be broken into four main categories: Project management features, usability and support, integrations, and pricing.
Extended reading: Wrike vs Smartsheet: The Comparison and Alternative
Smartsheet vs Airtable: Project Management features
While neither may be counted as fully-fledged project management software, they are commonly used as project management tools. Smartsheet has several built-in project management features including time-tracking, dependencies and workflows, real-time budgets and reporting, and links to resource management tools. Airtable does have some great visual tools to track tasks and progress, but it is generally limited to task management rather than project management per se.
Smartsheet vs Airtable: Accessibility, Usability and Support
When thinking about usability, we must consider how easily a tool can be accessed around the world just as much as how easy it is to use the software itself. However, we must also consider how easily the service can be contacted for troubleshooting and support.
Firstly, both Airtable and Smartsheet are available in web and mobile versions for iOS, Android, Windows, and Mac. However, they differ greatly in their language support. Smartsheet is currently available in 8 languages: French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and English. Sadly, Airtable is currently only available in English.
Secondly, both interfaces are relatively streamlined. However, Airtable’s set-up may require some time to get used to, especially with regard to its custom apps building instead. Smartsheet simply adds to the very familiar Excel spreadsheet format. Your team can build some incredibly detailed apps within Airtable, but it will take some time to get comfortable with it.
Finally, when it comes to application support, Smartsheet has the upper hand over Airtable. Smartsheet allows global users to contact them via phone, live chat support, tickets, email, and it also provides additional training content. Airtable provides the same but without phone and ticket support. This can make it inconvenient for users to raise, track and solve problems.
Smartsheet vs Airtable: Integrations
Integrations are the backbone of an effective PPM solution. Teams often use several different apps, tools and services for their project management. If these did not integrate with one another it could pose some major problems. While both have impressive integrations, Smartsheet edges out Airtable yet again in this department.
Smartsheet currently offers over 50 built-in integrations, with leading enterprise apps like Adobe, Microsoft and Google Drive. It also has an open API which allows custom integrations to be built. Airtable, by contrast, has over 30 built-in integrations with popular apps like LinkedIn, GMail and MailChimp, as well as some custom API capabilities. However, it is important to note that most of the integrations will require third-party services like Zapier, Integromat and Automate.io in order to work. So, be sure to check the full integration lists of both Smartsheet and Airtable before making your final selection.
Smartsheet vs Airtable: Pricing
Pricing is the area where Airtable may have the upper hand.
Airtable is available in four different tiers with paid and free versions. Their cheapest paid option starts at $10/ user per month. By comparison, Smartsheet does not offer a free version and its cheapest standard option starts at $14/ user per month.
As you move up the tiers for both software, you get more features and extended user capacity. Make sure to check which pricing package best suits your team and websites.
Check out these other articles on comparisons of project management solutions:
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IIR: Introduce, Integrate, Replace
Step 01
Introduce
You cannot run a portfolio on Excel and PowerPoint alone.
Project portfolio management is the discipline of seeing every project in one place, prioritising the work that matters, allocating people against demand, and governing delivery with real numbers. It is not optional at any serious scale. The moment you have more projects than one person can hold in their head, you need a single, current view of status, schedule, cost, resource and risk.
Excel and PowerPoint feel free because there is no licence conversation. The real cost is elsewhere. It is the hours spent maintaining workbooks, the version confusion, and the numbers that go stale the moment they are pasted.
A spreadsheet cannot tell you, on demand, which projects are at risk, where your people are over-committed next quarter, or how much of the portfolio budget is actually spent.
Introducing a proper PPM platform is the first step. Not to add another tool for its own sake, but to give the portfolio one place where the data lives together and stays live.
Step 02
Integrate
The instinct after buying a PPM platform is to make everyone move into it. That is the fastest way to fail. Project managers already have tools they trust, and finance already has systems of record. Force a migration on day one and you get resistance, shadow spreadsheets, and a dataset nobody believes.
Integrate first. Meet the data where it already is. Two directions matter.
Direction 01
Enterprise systems
Connect to the finance or ERP layer so actuals, commitments and budgets flow in automatically. Reporting stops being a monthly reconciliation and becomes a live view. Nobody rekeys a spend figure again.
Direction 02
The tools PMs already use
The direction most platforms neglect, and arguably the more important. The portfolio should read from the PM's own tools, not force people to abandon them.
The reason this matters is simple. That data is already there, and it is kept current by the person closest to it. When the portfolio reads directly from these sources, the status report updates itself. No chasing, no copy and paste, no reporting lag. The PM keeps working the way they always have, and the board gets a live picture as a side effect.
Step 03
Replace
Integration buys you two things: trust, and live data. Once both are in place, you look at what can go.
Every organisation carries tools and spreadsheets that either do not do the job well or carry a heavy maintenance overhead. The classic example is the resource spreadsheet. It is a workbook someone maintains by hand to track who is on what. It is always slightly out of date, owned by one person, and impossible to reconcile against real demand.
Replace it with the equivalent function in your PPM.
A proper demand management capability does what the spreadsheet was reaching for, with none of the overhead. It models demand against capacity across the whole portfolio, updates as projects shift, and needs no manual upkeep.
Replace deliberately, one function at a time, and only after the platform has earned it. The test is simple: if a spreadsheet is high overhead or low quality, and the platform does the same job natively, retire the spreadsheet.
The payoff
You stop producing reports and start reading them
Follow IIR and the nature of reporting changes. The status view is current because it is fed by the tools people already use and the systems that already hold the money. The overhead that used to consume the last week of every month disappears, because there is nothing to assemble.
That is the whole point of real-time reporting. Not a prettier deck, but a portfolio you can look at any day of the month and trust, at a fraction of the effort it takes today.
Built on Microsoft 365. Native ground for IIR.
pmo365 integrates with the tools your teams already run in, so the path from Introduce to Integrate to Replace is a natural progression rather than a rip and replace.